Traveling during the holidays can be stressful, especially when you’re navigating a new airport or stuck in miles long traffic. So if you’re planning to catch a flight or spend several hours on the road, you can use Google Maps to help you navigate to help ease some of the stress of traveling.
While Google Maps can’t prevent a traffic jam, there are a variety of ways it can help to make the journey easier, from quickly getting around the airport to using the Maps app offline. Check out some of the app’s best features for holiday travelers below.
For more travel advice, here’s the best time to shop for airline tickets.
1. Easily navigate through airports and train stationsÂ
If you need to quickly find a store in a large mall or transit center, Google Maps has a Directory tab for all airports, malls and transit stations. This can help when you’re running around the airport trying to find a place to eat or grabbing a last-minute souvenir before catching your flight.Â
The tab will tell you a destination’s business hours and what floor it’s on. You can look through restaurants, stores, lounges and parking lots.
2. Find out how busy an attraction is before going
To see how busy a spot is, check out Google Maps’ Busyness tool. Already you could search for a location, like a business, to see a chart that shows how crowded it is in real time. But a feature called Area Busyness lets you see when entire map areas are clogged with people.Â
To use the feature, open the Google Maps app on your Android or iPhone (or your computer’s browser) and move around the map to find a general area, say, downtown, a riverwalk or a quaint nearby town. The busyness information will now automatically appear on the map, so you don’t need to specifically search for a place to see how crowded it is. Google…
Read the full article here