Best road trip planner

The most basic requirement: you shouldn't be counting stops to fit within a cap. A real road trip planner accepts as many waypoints as your itinerary needs, whether that's twelve or forty.

Multi-day trips need structure. Grouping stops by day — with a clear sense of what you're doing on Tuesday versus Thursday — is what turns a list of pins into an itinerary you can actually follow.

Each stop should carry the information you need: check-in times, booking confirmation numbers, a note about the campsite reception, or a reminder that the car park is paid. Details that live in your head or scattered across emails are details you'll miss.

A shareable link means everyone in the car — or anyone helping plan the trip — sees the same itinerary. No more forwarding screenshots or reading out addresses from the passenger seat.

Plotting the whole route on a map reveals problems a list can't — a day that covers too much distance, a detour that doubles back on itself, or a stop that's obviously better swapped with the one after it.

Built specifically for trips longer than a day: no stop cap, stops grouped by day, with notes and photos per stop, and a shareable link for the whole itinerary. The map view plots the full route so you can see at a glance whether the distances work. Unlike apps built around discovery or social features, this one is focused on the planning itself — adding stops, ordering them sensibly and keeping track of the details that make or break a long trip.

The best tool for turn-by-turn directions and on-the-road navigation. You can save places to lists and plan rough routes, but the ten-stop limit makes it frustrating for anything longer than a day trip. Most people end up using Google Maps for navigation while planning the full itinerary in a dedicated tool.

Free and flexible: drop unlimited pins on a custom map, colour-code them and share the result as a link. There's no day-by-day structure and it's fiddly on mobile, but it's a solid option if you're happy to manage your own organisation and don't need anything beyond a visual map of where you're going.

Popular in North America, with a large database of attractions, quirky roadside stops and accommodation along your route. The free tier limits you to seven stops per trip; the Plus subscription removes that cap. Better suited to finding new places than to organising a trip you've already planned.

More of a trip-tracker and travel diary than a planner — it automatically logs your route as you drive and lets you add photos and memories to each location. Useful as a record of a trip rather than a planning tool for one you're still putting together.

Fix the two ends of the trip first — whether you're doing a loop back to the start or a point-to-point — then count the days you have. That gives you the constraint everything else fits around.

Drop in the places you'd regret missing before you think about order or logistics. Getting them on the map early means the route shapes itself around what actually matters, rather than convenience.

Divide the stops into days, checking the driving distances are manageable and that you're not trying to cram three hours of driving plus four attractions into a single afternoon. Factor in time for the unexpected detour, the long lunch and the view you'll want to park up and stare at.

For each stop, note the confirmation number, check-in window, any pre-booked activities and the campsite or hotel postcode. The detail that lives in your head is the detail you'll blank on at 7pm in an unfamiliar village.

Send the itinerary to everyone travelling with you and ask for a final look. Fresh eyes almost always spot the day that's too ambitious, the stop that's been listed twice or the stretch that turns a scenic coastal loop into a motorway slog.