Use cases
Planning a scouting trip
The scouting trip is where your shortlist meets reality. Half of what looked promising on the map turns out average in person. One place you barely noticed becomes the one you cannot stop thinking about a week later. The map carries you through the trip and absorbs whatever you bring back.
The situation
Five or six places on a shortlist and a long weekend. You want to see them all, you want to remember which was which a month later, and you want impressions filed somewhere you will actually open again.
The path
- 01Generate a route from the shortlist
Open the visit planner. Pick a starting point — airport, hotel, wherever you land — and let it order the stops. Re-order manually if a stop has a tighter time window than the rest.
- 02Export to your navigation app of choice
The planner produces a Google Maps link and a GPX file. Take both. Mobile data is unpredictable across borders and in mountain towns, and the GPX works without signal.
- 03Pre-load the map for the country
Open the map in the browser the day before. The metric layers are cached, so the details panel keeps working for any location even when the connection is poor.
- 04After each stop, drop an annotation
A few sentences in plain language. "Market on Saturdays. Train to airport is 28 minutes. The square felt empty at 6pm." Nothing fancy. The trick is putting them down before the impressions blur into each other on the drive to the next stop.
- 05After the trip, re-rank the shortlist
Open each shortlist row and update the notes. Drop the candidates that came up flat. Promote the surprise that you keep thinking about a week after landing home.
What you walk away with
- A finished trip with no candidate you forgot to visit.
- Annotations on the map at the exact coordinates where the thought hit you.
- A re-ranked shortlist whose order reflects what you actually felt, not pre-trip hope.
When this does not fit
A trip across many borders does not fit the planner. It is a driving-route tool, not a multi-country itinerary builder. For trips like that, plan country by country and stitch the pieces together with flights.
Frequently asked
Can I plan a trip without an account?
You can use the visit planner without signing in. You cannot annotate locations from your phone unless you sign in. The trade-off is yours.
What if the route is too long for one day?
The planner does not split multi-day trips automatically. Use the drive-time totals at the top of the route — if it crosses six hours of pure driving, split manually into two days. Better to lose a stop than to drive at midnight.
How accurate are the route times?
Driving-time estimates without live traffic. Good enough for "fits in a day, yes or no". Not good enough for "leave at exactly 9:14". Plan with a thirty-minute buffer per stop and a longer one for the city you finish in.
Verified · 2026-05-26