Trip Planning With Google Maps

There's an endless amount of travel planning tools out there, some free and some not. Google Maps is one of our favorites on the long list of travel apps because it's rich with helpful data to choose your destinations, is quite customizable, and is free no matter where you are in the world. Here's how we recommend taking advantage of Google Maps to plan your next trip.

Let's first outline the key features in Google Maps that make it a great tool for travel planning.

Google Maps categorizes points of interest in neat buckets that makes it very easy to navigate the wide world of things to see and experience. When planning a trip, I often start with two category searches:

When the choices are endless, it helps to filter to a shorter list of great options validated by hundreds or even thousands of other people. Ratings in Google Maps make it easy to quickly find tons of worthwhile experiences when choosing what to do, see, and eat during your next trip.

This is one of the best features for travel planning with Google Maps. Maps enables you to tag map locations with either a star, flag, or heart icon, making it very easy to see what you've chosen to do during your trip on the map. For example, you can use the heart, or "Favorites", icon list for all the food destinations and the Starred icon list for all the sites you want to see.

All the features above are useless if you can't access your Google Maps details when you're on the go, which is often the case for those traveling internationally without a mobile data connection. Of course, Google has us covered here. On your mobile device, you can select a map area to download so that you can access the map details while offline. This offline map will still show your custom list icons and the destination details when clicking on one.

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Now that we've got an understanding of the key features for trip planning in Google Maps, let's dive into how we recommend going about the planning process.

Once you've chosen a destination for your next adventure, let's say Mexico City, one of the first things we recommend when searching Google Maps is "things to do". This will bring up the popular attractions based on what many others choose to do while at that destination, such as museums, architectural attractions, plazas, parks, and monuments.

From these results, you can filter by pricing and rating to help whittle down to the best experiences. As you decide on which experiences you want to add to your list for your trip, mark each of them on a Google Maps list with a specific icon. We recommend using Starred icons for sites to see and experiences. You'll start to see your map light up with stars as you choose your destinations.

Next, we recommend searching "food" in Google Maps. This again will bring up a long list and let you filter for the best results by ratings and often by price and cuisine as well. As you find different local foods you want to try, mark each of them on a Google Maps list with a specific icon, different from the one you chose for experiences and sites. We recommend using the heart icon to easily see which places you've marked for food to stand our from your starred experience/site destinations.

After this first pass, you should have a decorated map of different types of destinations, and different icons for each category, to easily see where you'll be going during your coming trip.

We couldn't recommend a good trip plan that only includes ideas from Google Maps, so now it's time to scowl the rest of the internet and ask friends for trip ideas!

There's no shortage of great trip recommendations no matter where you're going. Some of our favorite sources for trip ideas include Trip Advisor, Nomadic Matt, and Earth Trekkers. As you find more and more destinations that you want to include on your trip, add each of them to Google Maps with the same icon convention as before (stars vs. hearts, etc.) to be consistent and keep everything in one place.

Now that you've created a full map of experiences for your coming trip, you'll have a great birds-eye view of what you want to see and do. This high level view makes it much easier to start planning what you want to do each day because it's easier to see what is close in proximity and therefore easier to do together.

When we plan the daily agenda for our trips, we look at our clusters on Google Maps for which icons tend to be close to each other and decide which ones can be experienced together in a single day. Pro tip: pay attention to hours of operation when doing this! The last thing you want to do is to plan for visiting a museum on a day when it actually isn't open and only find out when you show up in person. A typical day would include walking through a city area to see different famous destinations like buildings, statues, and parks that are all located along a path that makes it easy to to them all in an afternoon or full day. We'll also have some food options marked in the region to have great food along the way. Here's an example day-path through Rome.

To plan what you do each day, you'll need more than just Google Maps since it just doesn't have this functionality. Since you're reading this on Blue Planit, you probably won't be surprised that we think our travel planner is a great way to organize each day of your trip. You can easily organize all your map destinations into each day of your trip to have a really clear plan. Just create a new trip in Blue Planit and start adding your Google Maps destinations to each day as a new event. You can then drag and drop each event across different days to quickly update your itinerary.

You've done it - months of research and planning and booking has finally lead to being on day one of your vacation. You finally get to live the getaway you've been looking forward to!

Now that you're there, it's time to reap the rewards of all your planning efforts and enjoy beautifully planned days to make the most of your time. You're set for success because you've got your Blue Planit itinerary breaking down each day that you can reference at your Airbnb, and then you can hit the road (or sidewalk) with your downloaded Google Maps showing all the clusters you planned to see for the day on Blue Planit. As you walk out of your Airbnb and see the blue dot showing where you are on the map, you quickly see your first destination nearby and start your relaxing and leisurely stroll to get there.

This is the start to a great trip. You planned out all the experiences you want to have ahead of time and marked them on your Google Maps, you planned each day on Blue Planit to have just enough for a full and enjoyable day, and you have Google Maps to guide you as you live the adventure. What a life. This is how we go about planning our trips and find it to be extremely successful. Trip planning with Google Maps makes like 100x easier by planning ahead of the trip and navigating while on the trip. Thanks Google!

One fun bonus of using Google Maps to mark your vacation destinations is that you can always look back on Google Maps to a part of the world you've visited and see exactly where you visited and ate by looking for the custom icons you set. It's a great way to relive the trip and also recommend great places to your friends!