Road trip planner with multiple stops: get the best order

Last updated: August 12, 2026

The list is the easy part of a road trip: the diner someone swears by, two national parks, a detour for the world's largest ball of twine. The hard part is the order. Drive a good list in a bad sequence and you'll spend whole afternoons re-crossing the same stretch of highway.

Why stop order makes or breaks a road trip

Every stop you add multiplies the ways to arrange the trip, and almost all of them are bad. Planning by vibes — “this one looks close” — routinely adds hours of driving on a multi-stop trip, because a stop that looks nearby on the map can sit on the wrong side of a mountain range, a river crossing, or a slow two-lane road. Real driving times, not straight lines on a map, decide the best order.

Plan the route in three steps

SortStops is a free road trip planner for multiple stops — it sorts your list into the fastest driving order and hands the result to Google Maps:

1. Paste your list. Up to 25 places, one per line, straight from your notes app — or type them and let suggestions fill in the rest.
2. Pick round trip or one-way. Your first stop stays the starting point; a round trip loops back to it, a one-way trip ends at your last stop.
3. Sort, then open in Google Maps. The order is optimized with real driving times from Google's routing engine, and Google Maps takes over turn-by-turn navigation.

No account, nothing to install. Try the free route planner — it takes about a minute to sort a full trip list.

Multi-day trips: sort each day, not the whole vacation

For a long trip with overnight stays, the trick is to plan one route per driving day, with each day's hotel as the first stop of the next day. Day-sized routes keep every list well under the 25-stop limit, and hotels usually aren't up for debate anyway — it's the sightseeing stops in between that need sorting.

What about more than 10 stops in Google Maps?

If you've tried building a big trip directly in Google Maps, you've met its two limits: 10 stops per route, in exactly the order you typed them. Sorting first gets around both — see how to add more than 10 stops to Google Maps for the details.

What this planner deliberately doesn't do

SortStopssorts driving order — it doesn't book hotels, plan activities, or manage a day-by-day itinerary. Keep your trip notes wherever you like keeping them; when the list of places is ready, paste it in, get the best order to visit them, and go.