Published: 11 Sept 21 Updated: 11 Sept 21

So you’ve decided you want to travel Australia. You’ve started saving, have begun to follow some other families who are already on the road and you want to start jotting down all the wonderful places you want to visit on your trip. But how do you keep track of them all? Australia is a big place and there are countless locations and sites within those places that you’ll want to explore. Remembering them all in your head every time you see a travel inspo pic isn’t going to work and writing a never-ending list of towns in the notes app on your phone will quickly get real messy. A super easy-to-use tool we found works for us is a little feature in Google Maps called 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 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 need and follow the related steps.

Okay, so you’ve got your custom travel map set up, now what? We started by adding in the places we already knew we wanted to visit off the top of our head. Those obvious places like Broome, the Great Ocean Road, Exmouth, the Kimberley, Alice Springs, Airlie Beach etc. Having created a pretty empty map so far, we started browsing through the internet in search of more destinations to add. The Trips and Itineraries section of the Australia.com website was a really helpful website in highlighting some of the major must-see destinations in your journey around Australia.

It was at about this point in our research journey that we started following a heap of couples/families who were already travelling Australia via their Instagram or Facebook pages. I realised the value of not only seeing pictures of the places they were visiting but hearing their thoughts, tips and reviews. These insights from people in a position that you hope to be in one day are so invaluable!

Hot tip – there are a lot of social media pages for people travelling Australia out there and it can really start to clog your feed if you’re just following them on your personal accounts. Make a separate social media account to follow all those pages where you can just login when you’re in the mood to take it all in.

What I love about Google My Maps is that you can include a note for each plot point you add. This is really handy to record those extra insights people tell you about a place if you want to make sure you remember it, or if you discovered the place on a blog with a whole post containing relevant information, you could just add the link in there for future reference.

Now say we’re scrolling through Instagram and see a photo of an awesome spot, or we’re talking to our family who are telling us all about these magical places they once visited, you’re not just going to make them pause their story every 3 minutes while you add another plot point to your Google map. Likewise, exiting out of your Instagram newsfeed every third post to add a location to your map isn’t practical. The easiest method we’ve found is to use the save post function on instagram or quickly jot down the places we want to add to our map in the notes app on our iPhones. Then later we jump onto our map on Google My Maps and plot all those points on.

What do you think of Google My Maps? Do you use it for your travel planning or do you intend to start now? Let us know in the comments. It would also be great to hear of any other methods people use – different things work for different people. We know the Trip Planner on Wikicamps is a popular one too and you can read our comparison of that and Google My Maps here.

Happy Australia Trip planning!

Using Google My Maps to Plan Your Big Lap