Considering I haven’t driven yet, Google Maps has always been one of those apps I don’t open very often. I keep it installed for obvious reasons, but outside of a casual trip or trying to find my way around an unfamiliar place, there’s usually not much reason to use it. That is until I travel. The second I land in a new place, Google Maps goes from being an app I didn’t think of to being one of my most used apps.
I recently went on a two-week solo trip to a completely unfamiliar country, which of course meant that I relied on Google Maps more than ever. In my first few days there, I was constantly switching between different apps to keep track of where I wanted to go, what I wanted to do, and how everything fit together. I finally came across Google Maps’ Lists feature and realized that I could do most of it without ever leaving Maps.
I bounced between three apps to streamline my trip
Planning my trip was all over the place
To preface this article, I am a type B person. If you don’t know what that means, I’m the complete opposite of someone who plans every little thing in advance. I like to have a rough idea of what I’m doing, but I also prefer to figure things out as I go.
However, when you’re in a completely foreign country where you don’t trust anyone, it’s not always the smartest thing to do. I still didn’t want to map out every hour of the day, but I needed some sort of system to keep track of the places I wanted to go, the things I wanted to do, and the important things I couldn’t afford to forget.
So, before I left for the trip, I spent hours researching and mapping out what I wanted to do each day. Even the plan I made at home did not cause much trouble. I listed ideas in Google Keep, organized everything in Google Sheets by rough route, and used Wanderlog to see how all these places fit together geographically.
Lists replaced the two apps that planned everything
Two apps down, one chance left
By the third day of my trip, my perception of Google Maps began and ended with navigation. I would open it when I needed directions somewhere and close it when I arrived. If I was going to a cafe, I would occasionally check user reviews. But that was about it. I never thought of it as an app that I could actually use to plan a trip.
That was before I waited for my food to be served at a random cafe while scrolling through Google Maps to find the nearest department store. I accidentally tapped You open the tab at the bottom of the app and scroll through Lists.
Lists are exactly what they sound like: a way to group the places you’ve saved in Google Maps into customizable collections. Instead of dumping everything into Favorites or Want to Go, you can create a separate list for a specific trip, give it a name and description, and add restaurants, attractions, shops, or anything else you find in Maps.
Setting one up is ridiculously simple. Walk to everything you need You Tap the tab in the Google Maps app New listgive it a name and description and, if necessary, select an icon. From there, tap when you find a restaurant, attraction, store, or anything you want to remember Save on its Google Maps page and select the listing you created.
Unfortunately, you can’t currently create lists within lists, so there’s no way to create one master trip list and split it into separate days. I got around this by making a different list for each day of the trip. It wasn’t as neat as having proper sub-lists, but it gave me a basic structure that I created in a spreadsheet, keeping each stop directly in Maps.
Google Maps lets you add notes to individual places on the list, which means I don’t need a separate note full of restaurant names, things I want to order, reminders, or random bits of information I pick up while researching. On iPhones and iPads, these posts can be up to 4,000 characters long, which is far more than I need for one stop. This means I no longer need Google Keep!
Then there was Google Sheets. One of the reasons I made the spreadsheet in the first place was to give some sort of order to everything I kept. Google Maps listings can do this too. The locations in the custom list can be rearranged manually, so instead of looking at one big set of locations, I can place them roughly in the order I want to visit.
Seeing everything pinned on the map made all the difference
Pinder beats spreadsheets every time
Scheduling everything by typing locations into a spreadsheet or dropping them into a notes app will only get you so far. A cafe might look great on paper (and on the Instagram reel), but suddenly it made a lot less sense if it was 40 minutes away from everything else I had planned that day.
Here are the Google Maps listings that have replaced Wanderlog for me. Every location I saved was pinned directly to the map, so I could instantly see which stops were combined, which ones were completely off the beaten path, and where I could squeeze something else in without making a huge detour.
Emojis came in handy here. I’ve “emoji-coded” each listing for what it’s for, which made scanning the map at a glance much easier. Restaurants have one emoji, train stations have another, shopping centers have their own, and so on. Instead of tapping the same saved pins, I can instantly tell what place I’m looking at before opening it.
This one feature changed every trip planning
For my travels, the Lists feature has been much more useful than the three separate apps I’ve played with in the past. It kept me in one place for what I was really interested in without forcing me to plan every minute of every day. On my next trip, this might be one of the first things I install!
