How to use Google My Maps for travel: a 3-minute guide
The free, under-rated Google product that turns a list of places into a working travel atlas — pinned, exportable, available offline.
Google My Maps is the older, quieter cousin of Google Maps. It does one thing very well: lets you build a private map of pinned places, organised by colour and category, that you can open on your phone, share with friends, or export. For travel — where you’ve got a list of cafés you want to actually find at 9am in a foreign city — it’s the right tool.
Set up your trip map (90 seconds)
- Open google.com/mymaps while signed in to Google.
- Click Create a New Map. Give it a name, e.g. ‘Tokyo, April’.
- You now have a blank canvas. Pins go in layers — one per category (coffee, lunch, sights) keeps it readable.
Add places — three ways
- Search bar — type a place name. It pins it. Slow if you have 50 places.
- Import a CSV — Google reads a spreadsheet with name + address columns and pins them in seconds. The fastest manual method.
- Import a KML/KMZ — KML is the format curated guides ship in. Drop the file, every pin appears already named, addressed and categorised. (This is what Pin Reef volumes are.)
Take it with you
On your phone, open the Google Maps app, tap your profile, then Saved → Maps — your custom map is there. Pins are tappable for directions. Maps work offline if you download the area first.
Treat each map as one trip. Layers as categories. Colours as priorities. That’s the whole system.
What we do
Pin Reef ships hand-picked KML files: independent cafés, restaurants, galleries and more, one per city, with the chains and tourist traps already removed. Drop the file into Google My Maps and the layer opens with every pin already placed. Three minutes from buy to open.