How To Create A Google Maps Tour

How To Make Tour Route Maps On Google For Customers & Guides

How-to • Operations • February 19, 2018 •

One of the must-haves of any tour guide, and indeed, of any tour information you design, is a tour route map. Whether there are multiple destinations to be covered as part of your tour, or whether it is giving turn-by-turn directions to a specific site, tour route maps give your customers a visualization of the route between multiple places and help you devise the most optimised route.

You can use Google Maps to create custom maps for your entire itinerary. It's a simple process that anyone can use for free.

1. Start by creating a custom map

drawing-a-map-for-your-tours

Open Google Maps and navigate to Your Places > Maps > Create Map. Enter the desired name for your map and a description. Use a naming convention in line with your tour to make it obvious to travellers what the map is about and what it is documenting.

READ: How To Optimize Your Listing On Google Places

2. Get as detailed as you want

With Google Maps, you can get as specific as you want. You can design the map to display only the route between different cities and towns you'll be visiting with your customers. Scale the map further and you can design routes between popular sites in a particular city or get more specific by displaying restaurants, shopping streets and historical sites in a specific neighbourhood. Use markers for various locations with labels, descriptions and images.

3. Add layers to group locations together

group locations

Imagine being able to group locations together – say you want to highlight all the restaurants in a particular part of the city. You can do this by creating a layer. Select a place of interest then add it to the appropriate layer. A pop-up displays information related to the site including the street address, website and phone number.

READ: Destination Marketing For Tour Operators

4. Design routes on the map

You can also use layers to add different paths for walking and driving. You can draw lines to indicate optimum paths between sites and even switch between default map view, terrain or satellite view if you desire to give your map a different feel.

For the step-by-step process click here . To know how to embed it into your tour website, connect with us at Vacation Labs . We make it our business to get to the depth of what makes travel businesses successful. If you'd like to receive more of such insights or experience a trial version of a tour system , get in touch with us right now.

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