The Google Maps "Want to Go" List: How to Actually Use It

The "Want to go" list is Google Maps' built-in travel wishlist — the green flag icon that collects every restaurant from a Reddit thread, every viewpoint from a friend's story, every café you walked past and meant to come back to. Most people have dozens or hundreds of places in it.

Most people also never go. The list grows for years while the trips get planned somewhere else entirely. Here's how the list actually works, the features hiding in it, and — the part Google doesn't offer — how to convert it into a trip you take.

The basics: saving to Want to go

1. Search for or tap any place in Google Maps.
2. Tap Save in the place's detail panel.
3. Pick Want to go from the list picker.
4. Optionally add a note — "go at sunset," "book two weeks ahead." Future-you will be grateful.

Everything lands under You → Saved → Want to go. Saved places also show their list icon directly on the map as you browse — the green flags quietly turn any city you're exploring into a personalized map of your own recommendations.

Want to go vs. Favorites vs. Starred vs. custom lists

Google Maps gives you several saving mechanisms, and using them interchangeably is how lists become unusable:

• Want to go — places you haven't been. A forward-looking wishlist.
• Favorites — places you know and love. Backward-looking.
• Starred places — the legacy catch-all. Fine if you already use it consistently; confusing alongside the others.
• Custom lists — the power tool. One list per destination ("Tokyo 2026") keeps a trip's research self-contained and shareable.

A system that works for travel: save impulsively to Want to go all year, and when a trip becomes real, move that destination's places into a custom list. Our guide to saving and organizing places in Google Mapscovers the full list system, including the "Travelled" list for places you've been.

Features worth knowing

• See it on the map. Open the list and switch to map view for the geographic spread — instantly reveals which neighborhoods your saves cluster in.
• Share it. Lists can be shared with a link, so travel companions can see (or contribute to) the plan-in-progress.
• Filter while browsing. In many cities, saved places surface in search results and on the map with their icons, so "restaurants near me" quietly highlights the ones you already bookmarked.
• Export it. Via Google Takeout each list downloads as a CSV — full walkthrough in our guide to exporting Google Maps saved places.

The wall: a wishlist is not a plan

Here's the structural problem. The Want to go list only accumulates — there's no way to tell Google Maps "I'm going to Lisbon for four days, make these saves into a schedule." No day-by-day view, no routing between saves, no sense of what's near what. Google Trips, which attempted some of this, was shut down in 2019 and never replaced.

So the list becomes a graveyard of good intentions: 200 places, zero itineraries. The saves were the easy 10% of planning; the sequencing — what's feasible in a day, what order, what fills the gaps — is the 90% Google Maps leaves to you.

Turning Want to go into a trip you actually take

That sequencing step is what Triply is built for:

1. Open your Want to go list and pick out the places for the destination you're actually visiting.
2. For each one, tap Share → Copy link and paste it into Triply — name, photo, and category come along automatically.
3. Set your dates. The AI clusters your saves into days by proximity, orders each day sensibly, and suggests places to fill the gaps.

Twenty minutes of pasting turns three years of wishful saving into a routed, day-by-day itinerary. The full walkthrough with screenshots is in our saved-places-to-itinerary guide — and your Instagram saves and TikTok finds can feed the same trip.

Still deciding whether Google Maps alone is enough to plan with? Our Triply vs Google Maps comparison is the honest breakdown.