How to Make a Customizable Google Map to Plan Your Trip

I’ve been a travel enthusiast for years and years, and a full-time travel blogger (traveling a solid 1/3 of the year) for 4 years. And one of the things I do before each and every trip (yes, for real) is make my own, customized Google map for the destination I’m visiting.

I am a HUGE proponent of this technique and think it makes traveling and planning so much easier.

This guide will walk you through the steps needed to make your own custom map so that you can more efficiently plan your next trip.

Making a Google Map Serves Two Purposes:

1. It helps tremendously during the trip planning stage. With your own map, you can get a feel for where things are, how far they are from each other, and can plan out a logical itinerary. Plus, it’s much easier to decide on a place to stay.

2. It’s SUPER helpful when you’re actually IN the destination, as you can pull up the map on your phone, see what’s close, and get directions from your location to the attraction.

One final plug before we get into how to make the map: I’ve traveled with multiple different groups, just in the last two years, who all saw and used the maps I created. Without fail, my travel companions have commented on how helpful having that map was!

How to Make Your Customized Map

I highly prefer to make my map on my computer as I just think it’s so much easier. Once the map is made, you can access it from phone or computer. (I pretty much exclusively use it on my phone during the trip.) So, this tutorial is for making your map on desktop.

Here’s the process:

1. Open Google Maps and then click on the “hamburger” near the search bar.

2. Click on “Saved” to pull up locations, maps, and things you have saved.

3. Click on the Maps tab, and then click “Create Map” at the bottom.

4. Feel free to rename your map by clicking on the “Untitled map” words. The, to add locations, search for them using the search bar, or click on them directly. Once you have a location selected, choose “Add to map” to save it to your custom map.

5. You can click on the “Style” button to edit what they look like. I personally often do a maroon star, as I feel they pop out from the standard icons, but you can choose what you like.

Sometimes I will differentiate between restaurants, hotels, or specific items – like waterfalls or trailheads or museums.

By default, your map will be all contained on a single layer. You can name this layer by clicking on it. The three dots to the right will let you delete any layers you create but no longer want.

6. If you do add another layer, new locations will be placed on whichever layer you have selected. To move them to another layer, click on them once, then click on them again and drag them to the desired layer.

Note that the current layer you are adding to will have a blue bar to the left (the black arrow is highlighting this).

And there you go! You’re on your way to creating a map for your trip.

I don’t always use layers, so this is definitely a step you can skip if you want.

If you do want to use layers, I have found them most useful for grouping similar objects (e.g. all the museums or all the restaurants), or for separating out locations by days, especially when I will be in the same city for multiple days (e.g. day 1 in one layer, day 2 another layer, etc). But you can also just use a different color or symbol to differentiate.

Accessing Your Custom Map

Once you’ve made your map, you can easily access it from your phone.

First, open the Google Maps app on your phone. Then, just click on “Maps” in the bottom center.

You’ll see all the maps you’ve saved or created. Just click on the map name you want and it will open right up. If you click on an icon, it will show you the name, and you can use the “Directions” button to navigate to it.

If you want to add another spot on the map, you can choose it, and then select “Save”.

Two notes on this. First, I did have to scroll to the right to find the “Save” button. Second, when you save it you can choose what list to save it to, but note that it is separate from your custom map.

Though it will still be visible when you open your map app, it will not be visible to others you are sharing the map with. It is a personal “save”.

And that brings me to…

Sharing Your Map

Once you’ve made a map, you can email the link to anyone you want. Once they click on the link and view the map, it should automatically save to their Customized Map section, and they should be able to access from their phone without a problem. Again, so handy.

The Wrap Up

There is no limit to how many Google maps you can make for yourself – you can create and save as many maps as you want.

Being able to visualize where I want to go and the spacing between locations is very helpful is incredibly helpful when I’m in planning stages, and I also use it extensively when we are actually traveling.

Let me know if you use this method and find it helpful!