You can use Google Maps for much more than planning your route…
There are hundreds of apps that claim to help travellers, but only one is pretty much essential. Google Maps has become such a fixture that we often take it for granted – and there’s a lot more to it that most of us realise. Here are some ways to get the best out of it…
Stick to the orange bits
A few years ago, Google Maps started shading parts of towns and cities in an orangey-brown colour, rather than the default grey. This roughly corresponds to commercial areas of the city, although it’s officially for “areas of interest”. These orange patches are where you’re going to find clusters of shops, bars, restaurants and attractions. This is incredibly useful while mooching around a city, whether London, Las Vegas or Durban. Take a peek, and veer towards the orange, and you’re far more likely to find something worth investigating.
Download maps
If you’re going to be out of phone signal range, or facing exorbitant roaming charges in the Cook Islands or Guatemala , you can download the maps in advance. Tap on the circle (usually containing a picture of yourself) in the right, go to ‘offline maps’ and select the area you want to download. This will then work off the GPS, and pretty much as it would do if you were online.
Colour code saved places
When you spot a place of interest – it might be the Vieux Montreal hotel you’ve booked, a restaurant you fancy eating at or a promising-sounding craft beer bar in Prague – you can save it so that it shows up with a marker on the map of the immediate area. But those markers don’t have to be the same colour. When you go to save, there’s the option of saving them under “starred places” (yellow), “want to go” (green) or “favourites” (red). You can also click on ‘new list’ to make a custom list that saves in a turquoise-ish blue.
Now, the smart thing to do is set up a system that uses different colours for different categories. This lets you see what sort of thing is nearby. I use blue for hotels, red for restaurants, green for bars and yellow for attractions. If I’m hungry, I’ll look for an area where I’ve saved lots of things in red. If thirsty, head for a cluster of green, and so on.
Use ‘near’
One of the problems with a conventional Google search is that we don’t necessarily want the best restaurants in a city – we want good restaurants near where we happen to be, or are going to. This is where searching for “restaurants near… (name of hotel, or place you’ll be around dinner time)” is an incredibly handy function. It applies to bars and shops too.
Use the filters
You don’t want any old crappy restaurant though, so put the filters into action – these appear as a circular icon with three slider-like bars inside near the top left of the screen. This allows you to sort by type of cuisine, rating from other app users (go 4.0 and above for good, 4.5 and above for excellent) and opening hours.
Double tap to zoom
Only got one hand free, and want to zoom in? Annoying, isn’t it? But double tapping has the same function as pinching with two fingers, and few seem to know about it…
Check the traffic
If you get into the hotel late at night, then do a quick check how long the drive to the next destination will take you, you’ll be shown how long it’ll take at that particular moment in time. This is not especially useful, particularly if you’re going to be driving during peak traffic hours the next day.
The secret, therefore, is to open the menu next to ‘Your location’ (or whatever you’ve set the start point as), then go down to set depart or arrive time. Pick your planned departure time, and both the quickest route and the time taken will be adjusted to account for predicted traffic levels.
This isn’t an exact science, but it is based on massive banks of data.
Work out when it’s not busy
Those massive banks of data are also put to good use elsewhere. If you search for an attraction, bar or restaurant, click on it, then scroll down, you’ll see a ‘popular times’ section. This shows when the place is usually much busier and much quieter. That could mean the difference between getting a table or not, and a museum being hellish versus rather pleasant.
Find your stop
One of the worst aspects of taking public transport in a foreign city – particularly a bus – is not knowing when it’s your stop and you need to get off. You can fudge this by following the GPS tracker blue dot on Google Maps and thus having a rough idea of where the bus currently is, but in many cities there’s a more surefire way.
Go to directions, pick public transport, press start and follow the instructions. Once you’re on the bus, the app will happily tell you which stop you’re at.
Check the steepness
Some places can seem pretty close on the map, but be an absolute nightmare to travel between because 2D maps don’t take into account real world 3D conditions. Sometimes, you really don’t fancy lugging it up a really steep hill.
That’s where the directions for cyclists come in. Even if you’re not on a bike, switch to the cycling directions, and Google Maps will give you the elevation rise and fall of the route, plus a graph that shows the elevation changes along the way. That’ll help you work out where the steep bit is.
Remember where your car is
You know that blue dot that represents where you are? Well, that’s mighty handy in a massive car park. Tap on it, and a menu comes up. One of the options is to “save your parking”. Stand next to your car when you do it, and it’ll show you where the car is when you return to the car park a few hours later.
More travel advice
- How do airline codeshares work?
- How to play the US state numberplate game.
- In-flight health guide.
- Why do in-flight meals taste like they do?
- What happens in a plane emergency?
