What is everyone’s preferred way to receive travel recs? I personally like Google Maps, I’ve also seen wonderful collections specific to location. Hmm. Brainstorming ways to share more about my favorite PNW places - but unsure of the format.

Question

Emilie Bienvenew · Answer

Mapstr: the app that makes sure you never forget a great place: To keep all your favourite places and recommendations at your fingertips.

The app is absolutely brilliant: you can create your tags (my favourite is “recommendation” — just like Rec League!), comments and ratings to places, plus an AI-generated description. You can view everything either on a map or as a list.

You can also follow other people’s maps and save their recommendations to your own.

An absolute must-have for travelling, or simply for finding ideas for things to do.

Willa · Answer

Felt Maps: This is fully fledged GIS mapping software aimed at universities and nonprofits and is way overpowered for simple map tasks. The free tier, however, works phenomenally well as a personal trip map planner. The learning curve is steep but you can do so much with it, from highlighting good neighborhoods to walk, categorizing and saving different kinds of restaurants or shops, planning out bike rides, embedding pictures of attractions and relevant articles. The end result is a very well put together, personalized map that is  degoogled, ad free, works offline, and can be shared within a friend group. I find the additional legwork involved well worth it, and the maps are so beautiful and varied from a design perspective!

The image is of an older release; the maps look better now but I wanted to show it as a trip map. You can change the base map, too, if you want something out of the ordinary. So much inherent customization.

Grier · Answer

Lizzie's List: A Rec League Collection! This is by far my favorite way to receive travel recs now bc I can actually read the commentary, see the image, and click on the link if it interests me. Pro tip: you can automatically populate a map for your recs if you add a Google Maps pin to the rec itself (Advanced Settings). See Lizzie’s example.

Steve M · Answer

Using MyMaps to Plan Your Next Trip: This is not advertised at all on Google Maps but I like using MyMaps to plan trips since it gives you more granularity than the default saved lists. You can create layers to group activities by type or by day or however you want to organize. You can view all locations of a layer so you can plan routing based on proximity. It's a bit clunky to use but once you get used to the interface it's a very versatile tool.