Multi stop route planner

Plan a route with many stops in three steps

1. Add where you start. Your home, depot, store or office. Start typing and pick the right match.
2. Paste your stops, one per line. Copy them from a text, an email, a delivery app or a spreadsheet column. Numbers, dashes and bullets at the start of a line are ignored.
3. Press Put in the best order. The planner checks the driving time between every pair of stops and puts them in the order with the least total driving. You get a numbered run sheet, the time and distance between stops, and how much shorter it is than the order you typed.

Then drive it: tap Go on each stop to open turn by turn directions in Google Maps, Apple Maps or Waze, or open the whole route in Google Maps in parts. Tick each stop as you finish it, print the run sheet for a crew, download it as a spreadsheet, or copy a link that opens the same route on another phone.

Who uses a multi stop route planner

Anyone with more than a couple of places to get to in one day. Couriers and delivery drivers with a day of drops, Meals on Wheels and church volunteers, lawn care, window cleaning and pest control crews, field sales reps visiting accounts, home health visits, real estate agents showing houses, and families running a long list of errands. If you have ever typed your stops into a phone app only to be told you have to pay once you pass 10 stops, this planner is for you.

How the best order is worked out

Finding the shortest way through many stops is the classic travelling salesman problem. The number of possible orders grows very fast: 10 stops can be driven in more than 3.6 million orders. The planner first gets the real driving time between every pair of your stops. For up to 12 stops it then checks every possible order and gives you the best one. For more stops it builds a good route and keeps improving it by reversing and moving parts of it until no change makes it shorter, which gets within a few percent of the best order in well under a second.

The order is chosen by driving time, so a stop across a river or behind a highway may come later than it looks on the map. Traffic at the moment you drive is not included, so give yourself some extra time at rush hour.

Start, finish and fixed stops

Your start is always first. For the finish you have three choices. Back to start plans a loop that ends where you began, which suits a depot or a home base. Anywhere lets the planner end at whichever stop makes the drive shortest, which suits a one way day. At my last line keeps the last address in your list as the end, which suits ending at home or at a pick up point. After planning you can still move any stop up or down by hand, for example to visit a customer who asked for a morning drop first, and the totals update.

Why Google Maps alone is not enough

Google Maps lets you add up to 9 stops to a drive, counting the final destination, and you can drag them into a new order yourself, but it does not work out the shortest order for you. This planner does the ordering for up to 50 stops, then hands the route to Google Maps in parts of up to 9 stops, or one stop at a time with the Go buttons, so you still drive with the app you know.

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