Use Maps When You Plan! (?)

Yes, yes, and yes. Even when I am planning my activities in a place. I keep city maps from all the destinations I have been to help with either a return trip or to help a friend’s planning. My SIL travels to Bucharest for business so I had him pick me up a paper map. I’m not sure when I’ll get there, but it will come in handy then.
A great website I use, which maps out your day in a city, is Visitacity.com. I hate backtracking and this website is very helpful.

yes! i have dropped pins for places I won't get to for years! But they're there!

Love maps. I keep discovering more cool features of my online map that make planning so much easier. I still really like paper maps also. On occasion, maps have helped me discover places to visit that I likely would never have otherwise - one example is the Torrigiani Gardens in Florence. Got in a small tour of the place.

Beware when route planning. Very often they just connect 2 places with advice that is not the best as it is done by computer. As an example, go on Google Maps and put in for a journey from PORT TALBOT to CARDIFF AIRPORT in the UK. You will see that it tells you to take the M4 (like an interstate) to Junction 34 before heading south towards Cardiff Airport. Now, click on the little yellow man and zoom down to the roads that it tells you to take south of J34 via the village of Pendoylan. The streetview shows you that these are narrow country lanes. No way is this the best route. (The best route would be to leave the M4 at J37 and use the A48 almost as far as Cowbridge before going south via B4270 and then B4265).

This is just an example case - so beware!

I absolutely use maps! For most trips, google maps is plenty for planing. I do have a huge waterproof map for Iceland which has served me well for a handful of trips and is a must when planning. I do take that with us.

I love and use maps a lot!

I use Google maps for directions and route planning, but also buy one of the RS travel planning maps (I just ordered one for France) so that I can visualize the entire country at once. I hang it on the wall in front of my desk so I can look at it while trip planning.

Once I start defining my itinerary, I add my potential destinations to My Maps in Google.

Maps are the bomb!!!

Yes, I've loved studying geography since elementary school. Reading maps is a disappearing skill. I know young people who have no sense of direction or distance, and are totally dependent on phones to lead them. Older people learned that they could get by with letting other people read the maps for them. I think that's one reason there are so many unreasonable itineraries proposed here.

Maps are a major part of my planning , I'm positively addicted to them . It is not only knowing how to go from place to place , but having an understanding of where you are in relation to your surroundings. I indulge in them to the point that when I arrive in a new location , I pretty much feel like I've already spent a great deal of time there . One other trick in my toolkit , is that I keep a small analog compass clipped to my day bag ( I don't like being tied to a cellphone as if it were an anatomical appendage ) and a quick glance orients me to direction ( coming out of an unfamiliar metro stop , for example ) so I'm pointed in the right direction .

I know young people who have no sense of direction or distance, and
are totally dependent on phones to lead them.

The worst thing is asking Siri for directions.

We visited my partners in-laws shortly after they moved into a new house in Maine, and they were using Siri to route them into town. It seemed to me that we were taking a round-about way into town, but you could not tell that on the tiny cell phone screen.

If you could see the whole picture, there were no street names visible, and if you zoomed in to see the street names, you could not see the whole picture.

When we got back to the house, I used the 10" screen on my small netbook, and I could see that there was a faster, more direct route into town, but Siri apparently didn't recognize a short, ¼ mile long connecting street so routed us a much longer way.

That's the nice thing about using trains in Germany. The engineer never gets lost.

On paper maps, especially city maps, versus phone apps, you can see things that might be of interest near where you will be, whereas you have to know what those things might be, to ask for them in a search.

Maps are a huge part of my trip planning! Here’s my initial steps for anyone interested:

After I pick a country to visit, I’m focused on a map, selecting the major locations I want to visit. Alongside either a physical RS map or a screenshot map printed, I draw those locations on a blank paper in relative location to the map, draw lines connecting each place. I look up the train company of the country and write the amount of time to travel between each possible connection. Train type speeds vary, so longer distances geographically may actually be quicker.

Next step is back to the physical map, and this takes a few weeks. This is my favorite part and where I find those exciting “back door” experiences! I look up each city - small & large, on “ (city) images” and also TripAdvisor between locations. When I’m traveling solo, I’m fine with some 1-night spots, so any place worth 1-2 nights gets added to the map with a named clear Post-It arrow. I would miss most of my final itinerary if I avoided using a map!

I still like to bring a 1-page printed screenshot map of each city where I’m staying. (See link below) Since it’s a screenshot, I can enlarge the portion I really want and be able to read it - looking at the Bari tourist map on that site this morning. That’s reviewed during my next train ride, and I keep it in my purse for reference. During the RS Adriatic tour, I did bring the maps from the book with me. (We were really glad when his guidebooks changed several years ago from the drawing type without a consistent scale to real maps.)

Here’s a similar topic, and the available tourist maps on the link have been great for several trips!
https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/general-europe/handy-site-for-tourist-maps-for-travel-planning

I always download the city/area map to the area I will be at on my iPhone (CityMaps2Go), especially in new locations.

I use maps all the time for routing our motorcycle road trips. The plan is to stay off the major highways to our destinations, then hit the major highways for the ride home.

I wouldn't plan a trip anywhere without using my paper maps or at least online maps. I'm pathetically old school and can't give them up. I don't see how anyone can plan a trip without them. It's fine to rely on others for information on details but the big picture, the overall plan, of where you want to go and why and how is definitely up to you to research and plan. For that a map is essential.

When planning a trip, I use maps to "see what else is around there" once I've decided where I'm going.
That's on the wider level.

On a more street level, I will take the little yellow man and drop him on a street where I've decided to go and "walk" through a neighborhood or town.

The first time I visited to Assisi, it seemed I had already walked those streets because I was seeing familiar territory. It was very strange until I remembered I HAD already "seen" this place.
Now, one thing the "walkabout" on the map didn't reveal to me was the hilly terrain in Assisi... that everything flows downhill toward the Basilica. that means walking uphill back to wherever you started.

Oh, I just love planning a trip with a map! Hotels are chosen after careful perusal of the proximity of public transit and perhaps other things, daily itineraries are determined the same way, and once I am on the ground I have usually plotted out in my notebook a few directions to get me to crucial places. While out & about I use a Streetwise laminated map of the city if one exists, otherwise the paper tourist map is used. I may consult my phone maps but I don't rely on it to guide me step by step.

I work in the moving industry and while the advent of Google maps and street views have become a big help to our industry, there are times we still resort to figuring things out with an enormous atlas.

I do like Google Maps and use it to get an idea of an area's walkability. For a place I am interested in visiting I will start by locating the train station other modes of public transit and put that into context with a hotel I may want to stay, plus other attractions. Also using Google Maps and Street View I'll sort of "wander" around town too.

For journey planning I use City Mapper.

Another map fan! I start first with an old world atlas - love to see the big picture. For sightseeing, I research what I am looking for and create google maps noting places of interest. I usually copy these into a master Word doc that I organize pre trip along with pertinent directions so I can peruse the night before each new travel day. I also carry paper maps - love the small pop-up ones for cities. Enjoy rail maps, too.

I like planning and plotting possible routes. I am very NOT interested in using my phone and apps to navigate.

Just to be clear, I have gone mostly off of paper maps and onto screens. You lose some features, but online maps are so dynamic and how they can be used. It makes up for it, for me anyway ...

I could stare at maps for hours, they are so fascinating!

And I use the rail map of Europe to plot out trip routes since I primarily travel by train. I just enlarge it and screenshot for the area I'll be going and then edit the screenshot to add circles around city stops, and arrows between stops, to show direction. My favorite part of trip planning.

Hank, you are so right!
"I'm a bit of a map freak when I'm planning trips. But I notice when reading solicitations for advice that it's pretty clear many people don't look at a map, or not much, when they're planning trips. To me this is a big mistake."

Absolutely, no doubt about it, maps are essential to planning a trip.
And it's clear that many who come to the forum asking for advice have not looked at a map or Googled the mileage from one place to another on their itinerary.

Count me in as another addicted to maps! Have always loved maps.
I use both paper maps and online to plan my trips.

My favorite is a rail map of England and Scotland, showing all the rail lines and routes, that I purchased from National Rail.
It's about 4' long, 3' wide, posted on the wall of my home office, right by my trip planning desk.
I have maps of the same size for every county in England, plus one of Wales.
These make planning an itinerary a breeze, and I can refer to online maps too, which show markers for properties owned/operated by The National Trust, so as to include historic houses and castles in my plan.

I wouldn't even try to plan a trip to England, Scotland and Wales without using maps.

I can't imagine planning a trip without consulting maps, but as you point out, some people try to do that. I hope we help them by suggesting that they take a look at a map to see how far it is from A to B to get an idea of how long it will take them to go from one place to another -- especially if they're going to drive or take a train. Sometimes that reality can change an itinerary dramatically.

I'm a hybrid map user. I like seeing the big picture that paper maps or atlases provide as well as the close detail possible in online maps. It may be possible that some people aren't visual at all, much less visual learners, so they may have difficulty reading maps of any kind. Fortunately, I didn't inherit my mother's inability to read or follow maps.

When planning my trip to Wales last summer, one of the top things on my list was to take the Snowdon Mountain Railway from Llanberis to the top and back down. I was planning to spend 2 nights in Llanberis with the train trip on the day between. I don't know what was going on, but at the time I wanted to go, the train was not going all the way to the summit. Bummer!

Without looking at a map I would never have considered shifting my route to the coast from the interior of Wales and taking the bus all the way to Tenby. Determined to take a steam train somewhere, I stayed in Aberystwyth and did the Vale of Rheidol Railway day trip instead.

Then I took the bus to St Davids, stayed there and visited its amazing Cathedral which had not originally been on my radar at all. After that it was on to Tenby where I caught up with my original planning and spent a couple of nights before taking the train from there to Cardiff.

I love traveling by train, but I also love riding the bus. The routes are the closest thing you can do to driving without renting a car. I usually make a copy of the bus or train route (map) or use a regular map and follow along, just like I followed along on a printed map in the backseat of our car when I was a kid.