How to Create a Custom Google My Maps Travel Map

Google My Maps lets you build a custom travel map with saved places, layers, colors, notes, and directions. This guide walks through an example weekend trip so you can see how to add places, organize them by day, share the finished map, and import locations from a spreadsheet.

Google Maps and Google My Maps serve different planning jobs. Google Maps is useful for research, saved lists, reviews, and navigation; My Maps is the separate tool for creating a custom layered map. For the broader research workflow, see how to use Google Maps to plan a trip.

Open Google My Maps in a computer browser and sign in to the Google account where you want to save the map. Click Create a New Map, then give it a name and description.

The example below uses a weekend in Orlando, Florida, with separate map layers for each day and places for lodging, activities, food, and shopping.

Click Add layer in the left panel and rename the layer for the first day of the trip. A layer groups related places on the same custom map; for this example, each trip day gets its own layer from Thursday through Sunday.

Search for Universal's Endless Summer Resort, choose the correct result, and click Add to map. The hotel will be added to the currently selected Thursday layer.

Select the saved hotel and use the style control to choose a color and icon. In this example, the lodging pin uses a purple house icon so it is easy to recognize on the map.

You can repeat this process for all the things you find when doing your research, whether they're in your itinerary or not. Plotting places on the map will help you understand how things are situated relative to each other. On Thursday, I'm going add a few candidate places I'd like to eat and maybe a place to go shopping as well. Notice how all the markers are purple. This way I can easily see that it is associated with Thursday on my itinerary.

Start with the free Google Sheets travel planner and itinerary template, then install Travel Mapper to try map view and the full add-on features for seven days.

Here is how my map looks with all the layers with each one corresponding to a different day in the trip itinerary.

If you want to remove locations on the map, all you have to do is click the pin directly on the map or click the location in your layer and then click the trash can icon in the popup.

If you need to see directions from one place to another, which is very helpful on a road trip, Google My Maps has you covered here too. To do that, click on a pin on the map and then click the route icon. It looks like this:

The directions layer shows the drive between the places you add. Use it to compare the order of stops and review the step-by-step directions for that layer.

With the directions layer, you can also view the step-by-step directions by clicking the three vertical dots icon in the layer and then selecting "Step-by-step directions".

You can view the finished My Map in the Google Maps app while traveling. Sign in with the same Google account used to create the map, tap You, choose Maps, and open the custom map. Create and edit the map in the My Maps browser interface.

Google My Maps supports importing a CSV file that, when properly formatted, automatically plots all those locations on the map. This may be useful to you if you've collected a bunch of points of interest in say in your Google Sheets and wanted to then plot them on a map.

If you prefer to organize the itinerary in a spreadsheet first, start with the free Google Sheets travel planner and itinerary template. The sheet keeps dates, places, links, costs, notes, packing, and trip details together.

When you want the map and editing tools inside that workflow, install Travel Mapper for Google Sheets. Travel Mapper can show the itinerary on a map, help add location details, support drag-and-drop itinerary editing, email an itinerary summary, and export places for Google My Maps.