How to use the Travel Planner

Getting started

A trip needs two things: a name and somewhere to go.

1. Press + New in the trip list.
2. Type a name in the banner along the top, and set the From and To dates beside it. Picking a start date fills in a finish two days later, which you can change.
3. Tap the map where you want to go. A stop appears, named after the nearest town.
4. Tap again somewhere else. The road between them is worked out and drawn, with the miles and driving time on the button along the top.

That is a working trip. Everything after this is optional.

Your account

Without an account everything works, but your trips live in the browser you made them in — they will not appear on your phone.

The person button at the top right creates an account with an email and a password. Signed in, your trips save to your account within a few seconds of any change, and turn up on any device you sign into. Delete a trip on one device and it disappears from the others too.

Trips

The left-hand column lists your trips. Click one to open it; click it again to close it.

• ✕ on the card deletes that trip. It asks first, and the undo arrow brings it back.
• 🔔 on the card opens that trip's reminders, with a badge when something is due.
• Import loads a trip file someone sent you.
• Export — the file button along the top — saves the open trip to a file you can send to whoever is travelling with you.

Removing several stops at once

The bin button in the row along the top opens Tidy up the stops: every stop listed with a tick box, showing what each one holds. Tick whatever you want gone and remove them together. Bend points in the route are listed separately at the bottom. The undo arrow brings everything back.

Splitting a trip

Open any stop in the middle of a route and choose ✂ Split trip here. Everything from that stop onward becomes a trip of its own. You can move those stops out, or copy them and leave the original alone.

Adding stops

Four ways, all of which name themselves from the nearest town:

• Tap the map. The stop appears where you tapped.
• Search above the map for a town or landmark, then pick from the results.
• The location button — with the blue car showing, add wherever you actually are.
• Drag the road and choose "make it a stop" (see below).

New stops usually go on the end. If one clearly belongs between two stops you already have, it slots in there instead and tells you so — and the undo arrow puts it back on the end if you disagree.

To rename one, open it with the three-line button on its card and choose Rename. Tapping anywhere else on the card centres the map on that stop.

Changing the route

Three different things can be dragged, and they do three different jobs.

Dragging the road

Press on the drawn route and pull it to the road you would rather take. Let go and it asks what that spot is:

• Just change the route — drops a small red flag. The drive goes that way, but it is not a stop: no number, no arrival time, and the mileage between real stops folds together as if it were not there. Tap a flag to remove it.
• Make it a stop — a proper numbered stop with everything a stop has.

Nothing is decided until you choose. You can drag the marker about first, and the box itself can be moved by its blue top if it is in the way.

When a route looks wrong

Open the miles and time button. At the top you can choose the sensible everyday route, the quickest, or the shortest distance. Quickest will happily add miles to stay on faster roads, so if a short hop looks mad, try the sensible one. That panel also warns you if avoid tolls or avoid interstates is switched on, which is the usual reason a route wanders.

Times and driving days

Set Leave at above the stops list and every stop shows the time you would arrive. Legs that run past midnight say "next day" or "day 3".

In the miles and time button you can set how long you like to drive in a day, between four and twelve hours. Anything longer than that gets flagged as a long day.

Where a day runs out

Tick Mark on the map where each day of driving ends and black arrows appear along the route at each day's worth of driving. Tap one to turn it into an overnight stop — which is the point of them. With the location dot on, they count from where you actually are rather than from the start.

While you are driving

The location button shows a little car where you are, turned the way you are travelling, and the map follows along. Drag the map to look ahead and it stops following; tap the button again to snap back to yourself.

Ticking stops off

Come within about half a mile of a stop and it marks itself as reached: the card greys out and shows the time you actually got there. Without the location dot, tap the ✓ on any stop card yourself.

Running late

Under Leave at there is a box showing the next stop you have not reached, a fresh arrival time worked out from right now, and how that compares to plan — 18 min behind, 20 min ahead, or right on plan. It updates every half minute, and again whenever you move. A long lunch shows up the moment you get going again.

Inside a stop

The three-line button on a stop card opens it. You get its notes, its photos, the weather there, and three tucked-away lines:

• Gas, food and other places around this stop — ten searches that open Google Maps in a new tab. There is a box under them to type what you found straight into that stop's notes.
• Find somewhere to stay here — Booking, Expedia, Hotels.com, Airbnb and Google Hotels, already searching that place for your trip dates. Priceline is listed separately because their links cannot carry a place name.
• Rent a car here — Kayak, Expedia and Turo carry the place and your dates; Priceline and Enterprise open their own search page.

They are folded away on purpose. A stop is about your trip first; booking is there when you ask for it.

Photos

Worth reading properly — this one surprises people.

You can take a photo or pick one from your gallery inside any stop. What the app stores is a reduced copy. Your original never moves: it stays in your phone's Photos or Files at full size, untouched.

Why it works that way

A browser gives a website roughly five megabytes of storage. A single modern phone photo can be four megabytes on its own. If the app kept originals it would fill up after one or two pictures and stop saving anything at all.

What that means in practice

• Only the small copy travels between your devices, so a photo will look softer on a big screen than the original does on your phone.
• If a trip's photos are too large to send, the trip syncs without them and says photos stayed on this device. Nothing is lost — those pictures are still on the phone that took them, and still in your gallery at full size.
• Photos you save out of the app carry that stop's location written into the file, so your own gallery can place them on a map.

Saving them out

Inside a photo there is Save photo, and a stop with several has Save all photos. To save every picture from the whole trip at once, use the photos button in the row along the top — they come out named so they sort themselves into order, and each carries the place it was taken.

Photos on the map

Once every stop on the trip has been ticked off as reached, your photos come out onto the map: each one pinned beside the stop it was taken at, fanned out so they never cover each other, with a short line back to the pin. Tap any of them to see it full size.

They wait for the whole trip to be finished on purpose. Half-way through a drive you want the map clear for the road ahead; once you are home, that same map becomes a record of where you went. Stops tick themselves off when the location dot gets near them, or you can tap the ✓ on a stop card yourself.

The picture button on the left of the map hides them again if they are in the way.

Weather and radar

Each stop has a 7-day forecast for that exact place, and a 🌧 Rain radar here button that lays live rain over the map and moves to that stop.

There is also a cloud button on the map itself, under the zoom buttons, which switches the radar on and off wherever you are looking. It goes blue while it is on.

The radar is the National Weather Service picture, refreshed every few minutes. It shows rain falling right now, not a forecast — so a clear map means no rain, not a broken radar. It covers the United States.

Checklists, budget and notes

Checklists

Make as many lists as you like — packing, errands, whatever. Alongside + Add item there is ☰ Pick from common items: eighty-odd things people actually pack, in eight groups, from socks and toothpaste to jumper cables and pre-bought tickets. Tick what applies and add them all at once. Anything already on your list is greyed out.

Budget

Four sections — gas, lodging, restaurants and everything else — each with its own running total, plus a grand total and an optional limit.

Notes by day

The calendar button gives you a notes page for each day of the trip, plus quick ways to set the dates: this weekend, next weekend, a week, two weeks.

Reminders

The bell button sets nudges before you go — pack, rent a car, book the hotel, service the vehicle, hold the mail. Dates are suggested from your trip start and can be changed.

Printing

The printer button asks what you want:

• Just the trip — a cover page with the trip name, dates and total mileage, then the stops, notes, checklists, budget and turn-by-turn directions.
• Trip with a map for each leg — all of the above, then a page of small maps, one per leg, each framed on that stretch of road with the numbered stops at both ends.

In the print window, choose Save as PDF as the destination to keep a copy instead of printing.

Driving it

The planner works out the trip. Your phone's own navigation drives it.

Every stop card has a ➤ button, and every stop panel has Drive to the next stop. Either one hands that single leg to Google Maps, Apple Maps or Waze, whichever you like — with the one your phone prefers listed first.

If you dragged the road to take a particular route, Google Maps gets those bends too, so it navigates the way you chose rather than its own idea of the best road. Your avoid-tolls and avoid-interstates settings go across as well.

Why it hands over rather than doing it itself

Turn-by-turn navigation needs live traffic, road closures, rerouting when you miss a turn, and a screen that never sleeps. A web page cannot do those things reliably, and half-working navigation at seventy miles an hour is worse than none. So the planner does the part it is good at, and borrows the driving from apps built for it.

One leg at a time is deliberate: drive to the next stop, arrive, come back here for the next one. Your trip, your notes and your photos stay where they are throughout.

The journey video

The play button runs your trip like a little film. The app clears away, and a car drives your actual route, turning with the road. At each stop it pauses, shows the name and notes, then each photo — which shrinks and flies to that stop on the map, where it stays as a small thumbnail joined to the pin by a line.

By the end you have a map of the whole trip with the pictures pinned where they were taken. Tap any of them to look properly. Nothing closes until you press Close.

Once the trip is over — every stop ticked off as reached — those photos stay on the ordinary map as well, not just during the journey.

While it plays

• − and + move the camera closer or further away. The car slows down as you zoom in, so it always crosses the screen at a sensible pace.
• Tilt leans the map back so the road runs off into the distance. Try it with the satellite map.
• The speed slider runs from a quarter speed to twelve times, and can be moved while it plays. Slowing it down gives you longer on each photo.

Saving it as a video

When you press play you are asked whether to just watch it, or film it in one of three shapes: wide for a screen, tall for a phone, or square. Choose a shape and your browser asks which window to record — pick this tab. The journey then plays through on its own, the recording stops by itself at the last stop, and you are asked whether to keep it. Saving opens a normal Save As window.

The file is cropped to just the map at the sharpest size your screen allows — no browser edges, no sidebar. It is yours to share anywhere.

Worth a look

The lightbulb button finds places worth stopping for — theme parks, zoos, caves, waterfalls, museums, forts, viewpoints, historic sites — from the map's own records and from Wikipedia. Free, with nothing to sign up for.

It works two ways. Look along my route walks your actual drive and shows what is near it, saying how far each one is off your road. Look at what is on screen searches whatever part of the country you are looking at — useful when you know you want to go somewhere but not where. Move the map, zoom to about a county at a time, and look.

Each result says what sort of place it is and how far off it sits. Add as a stop drops it into your route; Read about it opens the article.

It is better at the notable and the outdoors than at shops and restaurants. For those, use Find nearby inside a stop, which searches the map properly.

Either way, check opening hours before you drive somewhere. Places close.

Installing it

The planner can sit on your phone or your desktop like any other app, with its own icon and its own window — no address bar, no tabs.

• On a phone: open the planner in your browser, then use the browser menu and choose Add to Home Screen. It appears as Trip Planner.
• On a computer: in Chrome or Edge, an install icon appears at the right-hand end of the address bar. Click it and the planner gets its own window and a desktop shortcut.

It is the same app either way — the same account, the same trips. Installing simply gets the browser out of the way.

Settings worth knowing

• Miles or kilometres — in the miles and time button. Changes every distance in the app, and switches the weather between °F and °C.
• Night mode — the moon in the header. Dark screen, dark map, much easier after sunset. It remembers your choice.
• Map style — the layers box at the map's top right: roads, night, satellite or terrain.
• Undo and redo — the two arrows in the header walk back and forward through everything you have done, including deleted trips. Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y work too.

Getting help inside the app

• Press and hold any button for half a second and it tells you what it does, without doing it. Let go and nothing happens.
• The ? button in the header is the quick tour — the main ideas on one screen.
• This page is the long version, for when the quick answer is not enough.

Still stuck, or something is behaving oddly? Write to smitt@jaysmittlabs.com and a person will answer.

What it costs

Planning is free. Keeping what you planned is what you pay for.

Build as much as you like before deciding anything — stops, the route, timings, the lot. Nothing is held back while you work. What needs paying for is keeping it: saving the trip to your account, having it on your phone, opening it again tomorrow, editing it on the road, and making the journey video.

What happens if you stop

A trip you bought for $3.99 is yours permanently and nothing changes.

Trips made under a yearly plan stay in your account and stay readable once it ends — you can open them, look at the route, the stops, the photos and the video. To edit them again, either renew, or buy that individual trip for $3.99 and it becomes yours for good.

Payments are handled by PayPal. We never see or store your card details.