Google My Maps vs Wikicamps Trip Planner to Plan a Travel Itinerary

Published: 10 May 21 Updated: 13 Jun 21

When planning for the big lap, you probably have hundreds of destinations and attractions you’d like to visit on your trip bubbling away in your head. Whilst many travellers don’t like to have a regimented itinerary set out for them to follow, it’s still important to know where your places of interest are as you pass through certain areas. The Wikicamps Trip Planner and Google’s My Maps feature are two of the most popular digital tools you can use to plot different points of interest and add in notes for each place. But which one should you use? We’re going to do a comparison of both so that you can decide which one will best suit your adventure.

Google My Maps

Google My Maps is completely free to use through GoogleMaps. It allows you to make custom maps that are accessible through any device when you sign into your Google account. You can even share the map with other Google accounts so that multiple people can view and contribute to the map. Google’s own spiel about My Maps can be read here.

Google’s instructions for My Maps will give you all the information you need. The explanations are broken into topics so that you can easily search for the information you want and follow the related steps.

WikiCamps Trip Planner

Wikicamps has a feature in the app called Trip Planner. This tool lets you create a trip, plot camps/points of interest and tracks your fuel consumption and kilometres travelled while on the road. It can also show you the route to follow between places based on the order you’ve added them to your trip. You can share the trip via a link for friends and family to see, although only the user who created the trip can edit it.

Wikicamps has a comprehensive YouTube tutorial that explains how to use the Trip Planner feature. It goes for about 7 minutes and uses the app’s iPad format to show you. If you would prefer to read instructions, then simsalsepicadventures.comhas an easy-to-follow explanation with accompanying pictures. The Wikicamps app also gives you a few basic pop-up instructions to follow the first time you use Trip Planner. It would be recommended to spend some time playing with the feature on a basic or made-up trip first but it doesn’t take long to get your head around.

Comparison

So which one should you use? Well, we intend to use both Google My Maps and Wikicamps Trip Planner, but for different purposes. We will use Google Maps while we’re planning and researching our trip to plot potential destinations that we would like to visit. Then when we embark on our big lap, we’ll use the Wikicamps trip planner to plan where we’re headed and track our adventure.

There are two main reasons why we chose Google My Maps to initially plot our desired destinations: its functionality and ability to easily share with other users. It is really quick and easy to add a point of interest on My Maps. You just search for that location, select it and a coloured marker will appear on your map.

Adding locations on Wikicamps is a bit more clunky and time consuming – it likes you to add a specific site rather than a place in general (usually you’re not interested in working out exactly where you want to go within a place until you’re a bit closer to actually visiting) and if you just want to add the name of a town, there are a few more steps involved.

Wikicamps also automatically adds a travel line between locations which can be a bit annoying when you’re not actually up to the stage of planning your route yet.

The most desirable feature of Google MyMaps we found was that it allows multiple users to view and contribute to a map. Couples or groups of friends planning to travel together can all add locations to the map from their own devices. You also have the ability to color code plot points to distinguish different types of attractions. This is harder to do on Wikicamps. Whilst the link to the Wikicamps map can be shared for viewing, only one user can add locations to it. The workaround here would be to sign into Wikicamps under the same name on multiple devices but this isn’t as user-friendly as Google. So for our purpose of plotting all the places we would like to visit on our trip while we’re in the planning phase, Google My Maps is the winner for us. 

Feel free to check out and interact with our ever-evolving map above. Let us know of any little beauties we are missing! We’re leaving off a lot of the QLD and NSW coast because we have already spent years exploring these areas and will continue to do so when we return, as it's just a stone's throw from where we live.

Something important we realised was that plotting places you want to visit while planning your trip is a different process to planning where you’re actually headed while you’re on the road. Scrolling through Instagram and seeing stunning photos of a gorge, checking the location tag to discover its name, then adding that to your desired travel map works while you’re planning. Yet when you’re traveling on the road, you don’t just want to know the name of the town.  You want to see different camp locations, reviews, travel route options, dump points, water access points and more! 

You don’t have time to find all this information for every place you plan to visit before you leave for your trip but it’s what you want to know once you’re actually on the road. This is where Wikicamps comes in handy. It provides all of this information, allows you to track your kilometres travelled and estimates your fuel consumption. We plan to use the trip planner on Wikicamps to research where we want to go next while we’re on our trip and track where we’ve been. At the end of our trip, we’ll have one of those coveted completed trip photos to share.

To sum it up simply, we’ll use Google My maps before we go to plot all of the possible places we would love to visit. Then once our trip begins, we’ll use Wikicamps Trip Planner to plan where we’re going and the order in which we want to visit those places for a couple of days or weeks in advance (as all the advice says – don’t plan out your trip too strictly and allow yourself to just go with the flow).

What are your thoughts on using Wikicamps Trip Planner and Google My Maps to plot and plan your trips? We’d love to hear what you think in the comments below.