No matter how carefully you plan your holiday travel, things come up and suddenly you’re dealing with chaos. Whether you’re catching a flight or hitting the road, Google Maps can help ease some of the stress of traveling.
These are some of the app’s best features for holiday travelers:
- Navigate through airports and train stations - If you’re looking for a specific store, restaurant or parking lot in a mall or transit center, Google Maps can help. It has a Directory tab for all airports, malls and transit stations that includes a destination's business hours and what floor it’s on, so you don’t have to run around looking.
- See how crowded an attraction is - Use Google Maps' Busyness tool to tell you how busy a location is in real time. When you move around on the map, the busyness information will display automatically, or you can search the location and scroll down to see busy times compared to non-busy times.
- Input your itinerary into Google Maps - It can keep track of all your flight, hotel, car rental and dining reservations in one spot, so you’re not scrolling through emails to find check-in times or confirmation numbers.
- Make a restaurant reservation - Google Maps can help you book reservations, like this:
- In Maps, tap the Restaurants button at the top of the map to see a list of places to eat.
- Choose a restaurant, and in the pop up window, you can choose to reserve a table or join a waitlist.
- Use Google Maps offline - You can still get directions when you’re offline:
- Before you go out, search in Maps for the location you want directions to.
- In the location’s window, pull up the menu at the bottom
- Scroll through the tabs and tap Download offline map, then tap Download again in the next window.
- Maps will download a map to your phone for the area you chose.
- Find EV charging stations - If you’re out in your electric vehicle, Google Maps can help you find EV charging stations and even give you estimated wait times for a charging port.
Source: CNet