Most itineraries are still built in a notes app: a list of cities typed in order of fame, with no sense of the ground between them. That is exactly how you end up booking a mountain day trip that is five hours of switchbacks, or two “nearby” cities that are a four-hour drive apart.
A map planner fixes this by making distance visible. Ours is free, works on any phone, and takes about five minutes to produce a route you can actually drive. Here is how to use it properly.
What the tool does
Four modes, one map:
- Plan: tap the map to drop numbered stops, or draw a freehand line and let it snap to real places. Each segment between stops is labelled with its distance, and the route totals show kilometres and estimated drive time.
- Guide: an audio-guide layer for the city you are in — attractions filtered by history, food, nature, culture or photo spots, each with a short narrated story you can play on the walk over.
- Sketch: mark the places you actually visited with notes, photos and a voice memo, then export a hand-drawn style route card to share.
- Area: jump between regions and countries, and filter the map to the part of China you are visiting.
The city library covers more than a hundred Chinese destinations plus the major international ones, each with suggested days, best season and headline sights.
Step 1: Dump everything you want onto the map
Resist ordering. Tap every candidate city, park and site — the Great Wall sections, a water town, a mountain, that rice terrace you saw a photo of. Ten minutes of greed now gives you something honest to cut down.
Step 2: Read the segment labels and start cutting
This is where the tool earns its keep. Look at the kilometres printed on each dashed segment and apply three rules:
- Anything over 400 km between consecutive stops needs a flight or a high-speed train, or it becomes a whole travel day.
- Two long drives on the same day is a red flag — delete one of the stops.
- Mountain and plateau segments cost far more time than their distance suggests. Add a third to the estimate.
Then reorder. Dragging stops into a better sequence often removes 200 km without losing a single sight — the tool renumbers and relabels as you go.
Step 3: Let it suggest the days
Enter how many days you have and let the planner allocate. A sensible default is about two days per city, and the suggestion will tell you when your stop count no longer fits your calendar. That is the moment to delete a city rather than shorten every stay.
Step 4: Turn the route into an itinerary
Once the line looks sane, generate the day-by-day version: which city on which night, what sits between them, where a car beats the train. Send it to a designer if you want it priced with a driver-guide and hotels; otherwise export it and book it yourself. Both work — the value is that your route is already realistic.
Step 5: Use the guide layer while you are there
This is the part people skip and then wish they had not. On the ground, switch to guide mode in each city: it lists attractions around you by category, so you can decide whether that side street museum or noodle hall is worth the twenty minutes. When something is genuinely good, drop a sketch pin on it with a photo — that becomes your own map of the trip afterwards.
Why visual planning saves real money
Three concrete savings. First, fewer domestic flights: a route reordered by distance often removes a hop entirely. Second, better transport choices: seeing that two stops are 180 km apart tells you a car is right and a flight is silly. Third, fewer wasted nights: cutting one city to keep two is the difference between a trip you remember and a series of hotel lobbies.
Who should use it
- First-timers who cannot yet judge Chinese distances — this is the fastest way to learn the geography.
- Self-drivers and photographers building a route with specific stops in a specific order.
- Families who need to see whether “one more day in Chengdu” fits before committing.
- Anyone comparing two draft routes — plot both and read the totals.
Getting started
The planner is free and runs in your browser on the homepage map — no account needed to plot and save a route. Pair it with your connectivity (plans on our travel eSIM page) and you have the two things that decide how a China trip actually feels: a route that fits the calendar, and data that works the moment you land.
Frequently asked questions
Does it work on a phone?
Yes — the map is full-screen on mobile with the mode switcher along the top, which is how most people use it on the road.
How accurate are the drive times?
They are road-distance estimates, so treat mountain and border-crossing routes as slower than shown.
Can I save and come back to a route?
Yes. Drafts save locally, and the travel journal keeps the route with your notes and photos.
Is it only for China?
China is the deep library, with major destinations across Asia, Europe and beyond for multi-country trips.
A full walkthrough, with numbers
Say you want Beijing, Pingyao, Xi’an and Chengdu in nine days. Drop all four on the map and the tool immediately tells the story:
- Beijing → Pingyao reads roughly 400 km; that is a rail day, not a driving day.
- Pingyao → Xi’an is long and awkward overland; the sensible move is rail back through a hub or a short flight.
- Xi’an → Chengdu is a spectacular rail journey through the Qinling mountains — keep it on the train.
- Suggested duration comes out at eight days for four cities, which fits — and if you add Shanghai, the tool pushes you to twelve.
That single pass prevents the classic mistake: booking five cities in nine days because the names were famous and the gaps were invisible.
Using each mode well
Plan mode
Tap to drop stops, drag markers to nudge them, and use the draw tool when you have a road trip shape rather than a city list. Distance labels on each segment update as you reorder, so the cost of every decision is visible immediately.
Guide mode
Once you are in a city, switch to guide mode and filter by what you actually have time for — history, food, nature, culture or photo spots. It answers the 4 p.m. question: “what is worth twenty minutes from here?”
Sketch mode
Pin the places you loved with a photo or a voice note. By the last day you have your own annotated map of the trip, which is a better souvenir than a folder of photos and a far better starting point for the next one.
Area mode
Jump straight to the region you are visiting — north, east, southwest, Silk Road — and see which cities are in the library with their suggested days and best season.
Planning with another person
The most effective pattern for couples and groups: each person plots their wish list separately, then merge onto one map. Disagreements about which city to cut resolve much faster when the distance labels make the argument for you — nobody has to be the one who said no.
Why this beats a list
A list optimises for names you recognise. A map optimises for the thing you cannot visualise from a list: the ground in between. Since travel time is the largest fixed cost on any China itinerary, planning where that cost is visible is simply better planning.