This post may seem a bit, “well duh” to some of you, but it’s the kind of thing that you often see on a site like Lifehacker and think, “why didn’t I think of that..”, so what the hell, here we go:

For my last few holidays i’ve been using Google MyMaps to help with planning where to stay and what to see. If you’re not familiar with MyMaps it’s the offshoot of the main maps.google.co.uk which allows you to stick your own pins in the map and create sharable collaborative maps.

I’ve found that it really comes into it’s own when you’re visiting a strange city and you’re not sure of the relative distances between things. Typically when visiting a European capital i’ll already have a shortlist (rapidly growing) of bars and restaurants I want to visit, museums and attractions I want to see and other points of interest.

There’s also a rather handy tip at the end of this post to help you take all that info with you….so how do we get started?

1. 1. Voodoo - Gather materials and start sticking in pins
   Ok, lets get this party started. First thing to do is gather some resources. If you’ve got a travel guide, great, if it’s online even better and if you’ve started making a short list of things to do and see; even better. Divide these up into categories. I typically go for Bars, Clubs, Restaurants, Shopping, Attractions (Museums etc)

   Fire up maps.google.co.uk, click on the My Maps tab and select Create a new map. At this point you’ll need to name the map and select whether it’s public or private. Public maps are great if you’re travelling with friends as you can share the results with them or even edit it collaboratively.

   Now run a search on the map for the first of your tourist attractions (or bars, or whatever), check you have the right place and either select “Save to My Maps” in the speech bubble that pops up when you click the pin. Or use the tool at the top of the map to drop a new pin at that location. Choosing an appropriate icon at this stage can be helpful. Eg. Knife and Fork, Cocktail glass or just a plain ‘ol pin for an attraction.

   Repeat this until you have a good spread of the main attractions/bars etc marked. Doing this in Firefox or IE7+ is a good plan, as you can open lots of extra browser tabs to check details, confirm street addresses or find other things to mark using other city guide sites.

2. 2. Now zoom out and look for clusters
   The result of our labours should be some clusters of attractions allowing you to scope out the best areas to stay in. Typically i’ll be looking for the clusters of bars/clubs.

   The reason? In the morning it’s usually no trouble to hop on public transport and whizz off to see the sights, then spend the day working your way back to a hotel. In the evening however, (or the small hours) when you’re a little the worse for wear, a hotel in staggering distance from the main bars is a godsend!

3. 3. Start finding hotels in the areas you’ve marked
   If you’re anything like me you’ll be looking for that happy medium of a good hotel, in a great location at a fantastic price. At this point it all starts to get a bit crazy flipping between sites and comparing hotel deals. I tend to use a combination of:

   kayak.co.uk (an excellent hotel/flights scraper and comparison engine)
   laterooms.com
   hotels.com

   All of the above will find you great deals, my next step is to check out any that sound good on tripadvisor.com, after some narrow escapes I now never book ANYWHERE without checking out the reviews first.

   Hopefully by now you’ve got an idea of 3 or 4 hotels in the right price range and roughly the right locations. It’s at this stage I stick some pins in the map for that shortlist of hotels and one of the big payback points of this whole exercise comes in.

   Now you can play around with the map and start to find patterns in the data. Several times i’ve realised that the hotel I was about to book is on a noisy main road or actually a lot further from where I wanted to be than it suggested. Many hotels say they are “just a few steps from…” to mean 10 minutes walk!

   Often while you’re realising this, you also spot another hotel nearby that’s better, cheaper, quieter or all three.

   You’ll start to see, very easily, how well located the hotels are in relation to the bars and attractions and even more importantly, in most major cities, how close they are to a metro/bus/tram/tube stop and by clicking that stop which lines run from there.

   MyMaps also enables you to use “Mapplets”, little bolt on applications. The Distance Measurement Tool mapplet is really useful at this stage, it’ll let you draw lines on the map between points and see how far they are apart in miles/km/olympic swimming pool lengths etc.

4. 4. Tidy up the map
   Ok, so we now have a nice personalised map, we’ve hopefully booked our hotel. So we can now delete the pins for the hotels we’re not using and remove any other stuff that got added and is now redundant.

   Your map should now have bars/clubs/museums and your hotel marked. For extra credit you can now start doing stuff like working out the best route in from the airport on public transport.

5. 5. Take the map with you…
   Right, this is where it all falls down.

   Obviously the next thing you’ll want to do is take the map on holiday and keep a copy with you while you’re sightseeing. But, having built a fantastic mapping application, Google seem to have tacked on the printing functionality in a bit of a rush at the end of the day and never got round to improving it.

   Printing your MyMap doesn’t really work that well, you get a map with all your pins on and an accompanying list of pins and symbols. Unfortunately, that means you have 5 cocktail glasses on the map and 5 bars listed at the side…and no way of knowing which is which. Unfortunately there’s also no way of adding numbered pins on a printout, or adding small tooltips to the pins with the venue name.

   In the past i’ve had to resort to printing out a few copies of my map, usually at different zoom levels or zoomed into various cluster areas of pins and then scribbling the names next to each pin with a pen. Not ideal.

   Until now. Someone rather wonderful (and unnamed on his site unfortunately) has created a script which sucks in the .KML file of your MyMap (a link to which is at the top of the MyMap screen as “View in Google Earth”) and spits out a version with numbered pins and a list underneath of what they all are. Perfect for printing and taking with you.

   You’ll find it here:
   http://maps.taurich.org/cgi-bin/print-kml.cgi

   Of course, in these enlightened days, taking a paper printout with you all seems a bit luddite. After all, surely we could just look at it on our iPhone?

   Sadly not, the iphone’s built in Maps applet doesn’t support MyMaps, or any of the more fancy custom features. Putting a maps URL into the built in Safari causes it to ping you into the maps applet and if you do manage to get it running in the browser then it’s not terribly stable or usable in mobile Safari.

   I guess in the meantime you could PDF the printout and load it onto the phone via an email? Better ideas greatfully received in the comments…