.png)
Use the Trip Planner above to visually plan your next vacation, road trip or adventure on a map. It's completely free and you don't need to sign up.
Add markers for destinations, restaurants, hotels and things to do. Draw routes between stops, color-code different days of your travel itinerary, highlight areas you want to explore and add your own text, arrows, emojis and drawings.
Whether you're planning a weekend getaway, a cross-country road trip or a trip around the world, putting your plans on a map can make trip planning much easier.
Start by adding the places you already know you want to visit.
Search for a city, attraction, restaurant or address using the search bar, then add a marker to your map.
You don't need to plan your entire travel itinerary right away. Start by getting your ideas onto the map.
Once you can see your destinations and points of interest together, it becomes much easier to decide which places belong on the same day and how you might travel between them.
Use markers to plot everything you're considering for your trip.
That might include:
You can use the search bar to find a location or simply drop a marker directly onto the map.
For example, if you're planning a trip to New York City, you could mark your hotel, restaurants you want to try and all the things to do on your list.
Planning a national parks road trip? Add each park to the map first, then begin figuring out the route between them.
The goal at this stage isn't to build a perfect itinerary. It's to get your ideas out of a checklist and onto a map where you can actually see how they fit together.
One of the easiest ways to organize a trip is to use a different color for each day.
For example:
Choose your color before adding markers, routes or shapes to the map.
Once you've planned several days, the colors make your entire travel itinerary much easier to understand at a glance.
You don't have to organize by day, either.
You could use one color for restaurants, another for accommodations and another for things to do.
Or separate your must-see places from the optional stops on your bucket list.
Use whatever system makes sense for your trip.
A map is especially useful when you're planning a road trip.
Start by adding your starting point and final destination. Then add cities, national parks, attractions and possible stopovers along the way.
Use the Route Tool to connect your stops and visualize the journey.
For example, you might create a road trip with:
San Francisco → Yosemite National Park → Las Vegas → Grand Canyon → Los Angeles
Once the destinations are on a map, it's much easier to spot places that are far out of the way or discover stops that fit naturally into your route.
You can also use different colors for each day or section of your road trip.
This Trip Planner isn't a route optimization tool, so you'll still want to check actual driving distances and travel times before your trip. But it's useful for visually planning where you want to go and the general route you'd like to take.
A travel itinerary can look perfectly reasonable as a list while making very little sense geographically.
Imagine you've saved ten things to do in a city.
If you simply visit them in the order you found them in a travel guide, you might spend the entire day going back and forth across town.
Put those same ten places on a map and you may discover that five are clustered together in one neighborhood.
That's one of the biggest advantages of planning a trip visually.
Try grouping nearby markers together, then assign those groups to different days.
Your itinerary can become more about exploring one area at a time and less about constantly figuring out transportation to the next stop.
Your trip isn't just attractions.
Add markers for restaurants, cafés, hotels and accommodations alongside the things you want to do.
This can be especially useful when choosing where to stay.
If most of the places on your itinerary are concentrated in one part of a city, seeing them together may help you choose an accommodation nearby.
Restaurants can also become natural stops in your itinerary.
Instead of keeping a separate list of restaurants, put them on your map alongside your attractions. Then when you're planning a particular day, you can see which restaurants are close to where you'll already be.
Sometimes you don't have a specific destination in mind.
You might simply want to explore a neighborhood, national park, beach or region.
Use the Polygon Tool to draw around an area you want to explore.
Circles are useful for highlighting a broader area when you don't need an exact boundary.
For a city trip, you might highlight several neighborhoods and assign a different one to each day.
For a longer road trip, you could use shapes to highlight national parks or regions you want to spend more time exploring.
Not every part of a trip needs to be reduced to individual markers.
Use the Text Tool to add information directly to your trip map.
For example:
DAY 1 — OLD TOWN
HOTEL — 3 NIGHTS
DINNER RESERVATION — 7:30 PM
PICK UP RENTAL CAR
OPTIONAL STOP
You could also label transportation changes, events, overnight stopovers or important parts of your route.
This is particularly useful when you're turning a collection of places into an actual travel plan.
You can make your Trip Planner even easier to scan with emojis.
For example:
Use arrows to show the direction of your trip or the order in which you want to visit places.
You can also use the Paintbrush Tool to draw freely on the map.
There's no correct way to design your trip map. The goal is simply to make your plans easier for you to understand.
You don't need to know exactly where you're going before opening a travel planner.
The map can also help you decide.
Start adding destinations from your bucket list.
Maybe you've always wanted to visit Portugal, Morocco and southern Spain. Put them all on the map.
Or perhaps you're deciding between several national parks for a summer road trip. Mark each one and see where they're located relative to one another.
You may discover a natural route between several places that you hadn't considered visiting on the same trip.
Trip planning doesn't always have to begin with an itinerary. Sometimes the map helps you figure out what the trip should be.
Maps can also be useful for group travel planning.
Everyone tends to arrive with their own list of restaurants, attractions and things to do.
Putting those ideas on one map makes it easier to understand everyone's suggestions geographically.
You could use different colors for different categories or people, then look for areas where several ideas overlap.
For a romantic getaway, family vacation or trip with friends, this can be easier to understand than comparing several separate checklists and travel guides.
A good trip plan isn't necessarily the itinerary with the most stops.
Once you've added everything you're interested in, look at the whole map before deciding what makes the final cut.
Try to group nearby attractions together. Consider your transportation between areas. Check realistic travel times before committing to a schedule.
Keep a few places optional rather than trying to visit everything on your list.
And leave room to explore.
Travel guides, recommendations and checklists are great for finding ideas, but your map can help you turn those ideas into a trip that actually makes geographic sense.
This Trip Planner is designed to be quick and simple, so you don't need to create an account.
When you're finished, take a screenshot of your map to save your trip plan.
On a Mac, press Cmd + Shift + 4. On Windows, use the Snipping Tool.
If you want a trip map that you can save, update later, share with other travelers or turn into a fully interactive map with clickable markers, use Atlist to create a more advanced version.