Google Maps Want to Go vs Travel Plans: Which List to Use

Want to go and Travel plans are two of the built-in lists every Google Maps account gets, and Google doesn't give them different features. Both hold saved places, show them on your map, and keep an icon you can't change. The difference is how you use them: Want to go as a someday list, Travel plans for a trip that's coming up. For a real trip, the better choice is neither. Make one custom list per trip, which can take its own emoji, be put in itinerary order and be shared without exposing years of other saves.

Here's what each built-in list is, what changed recently, and a simple setup that keeps trips apart.

The built-in lists in Google Maps

Google's help pages name the default lists in two places, and the names differ slightly by platform. The desktop version of the lists help page, checked on November 2, 2026, lists Favorites, Want to go, Travel plans, Starred places and Saved places. The Android and iPhone versions list Favorites, Want to go, Starred places, Labeled and Travel plans. Google's only stated rule for all of them: "You can't edit the icons for these default lists."

Google's February 2017 launch post described saving a place to "one of several pre-set lists like 'Want to Go' or 'Favorites'" or to "a new list that you name yourself." Travel plans came later: in an April 2022 Google Maps Community thread, a user wrote that they had "recently noticed" a new save option called Travel Plans and asked what people were using it for. Google's private label help page explains Labeled: labeled places "show up on your map, in search suggestions, and in Google Photos."

On iPhone and iPad in some countries, you may also see a Screenshots list, which collects places that Google Maps finds in your screenshots. Our guide to saving places from screenshots covers how it works.

Want to go vs Travel plans: what's actually different

Nothing in Google's help pages separates the two. Google describes no dates, trip grouping or reminders for either. Both appear on your map with their own fixed icon, both can be hidden from the map, and both are capped like every list at 3,000 entries, according to Google's help page on saving places.

So the difference is the one you assign:

• Want to go works as an inbox. Every place someone mentions, every café from a Reel, every "one day" idea.
• Travel plans suits a single trip that's coming up, if you only ever plan one trip at a time.

The problem with both is that they're shared across your whole life in Google Maps. Want to go fills up with years of saves from every city. Travel plans works for one trip, then collects the next one on top. A user in a 2023 Google Maps Community thread trying to clear out their saved places, Want to go and Travel plans put it simply: "there's no easy way to do this."

Why one custom list per trip is better

A list you create yourself can do everything the built-in lists do, plus several things that matter on a trip:

Three of those deserve a closer look.

Order. Google's Android help page describes Edit > Customize list order, where you drag places into the order you want. When Google added this in March 2024, its announcement suggested using it to "organize them chronologically, like an itinerary." That only makes sense in a list that holds a single trip.

Sharing. Google's help says anyone who can view a shared list can see the names and profile pictures of people who joined it, and who added or edited places and notes. That's fine for "Lisbon, May" and odd for a Want to go list you've kept since 2017. Our guide to sharing a Google Maps list covers view links and editors.

Export. Google Takeout's Saved option exports one CSV file per list. A trip list comes out as one clean file you can import into Google My Maps, as our guide to exporting a Google Maps list shows.

Within a trip list, you can also sort places with tags, which some accounts now have. Our guide to list icons and tags covers what's available on each platform.

A simple setup that keeps trips apart

This uses the built-in lists for what they're good at and gives each trip a list of its own.

1. Use Want to go as the inbox. Save anything that sounds interesting, anywhere, without thinking about it.
2. Make a list when a trip becomes real. On a phone, tap You > New list and name it after the trip ("Lisbon, May 2027"). Then give it an emoji with More > Edit list > Edit icon.
3. Move the places in. Open each place from Want to go near your destination, tap Save and add it to the trip list. On Android, Google's You tab help also describes a multi-select under You > See all, your recent places, where you tick several places and tap Save to add them to a list at once.
4. Put the list in order. Group places by neighborhood, then by day, with Customize list order. Our guide to planning by neighborhood covers the grouping.
5. Build the day plan. For anything longer than a weekend, move the list into Google My Maps with one layer per day. Our guide to mapping your itinerary in Google Maps walks through it.
6. After the trip, save the winners to Favorites. Then delete or keep the trip list.

Who each list suits:

What changed in 2025 and 2026, and what didn't

A Substack essay titled "The End of Google Maps Lists" ranks for list searches, and its web address says lists are shutting down. The essay, published on August 20, 2025 by the CEO of the app Satlantis, says the opposite in its body: "Google maps lists are not shutting down (yet)." It's an argument that lists are a poor social tool, followed by an announcement of the author's own app. Google hasn't announced any change to lists.

What Google has changed adds to lists rather than replacing them:

• List order and curated lists arrived in March 2024, according to the announcement above.
• Screenshot to save puts places it finds in your screenshots into a Screenshots list, on iPhone and iPad in certain countries, according to Google's help page for the feature.
• Tags inside lists have been reported since mid-2025, and Google Maps posted on X on January 1, 2026: "Don't forget you can add tags to your lists on Google Maps."
• Ask Maps, which Google announced in March 2026, personalizes answers using places you've searched for or saved and lets you save its suggestions to a list.

None of these changed what Want to go and Travel plans do. They make custom lists more useful, which is one more reason to plan each trip in its own.

Where Vidtrip fits

Vidtrip, the tool we make, plans from one public YouTube travel guide rather than from your Google Maps lists, so it's only part of this picture. If your trip list started as places from a guide, paste the guide's link, answer four questions and pay $4.99 once: in about a minute you get a day-by-day plan with each stop looked up on Google Maps and a KML file with one folder per day for My Maps, where your own list can sit beside it as another layer. If the video can't be planned from, the payment is refunded automatically.

Open the Istanbul example plan to see a full plan first, or paste a guide's link into the generator.