Multi-Stop Route Planner – Best Order for Many Stops

A free route planner for multiple stops

This route planner for multiple stops works out the best order to visit a list of places — a road trip through several cities, a day of sales calls, or a delivery run. Paste the stops one per line, starting with where you set off, and it finds the order with the shortest total distance for a round trip or a one-way route, draws it on a map, and gives you Google Maps links, a GPX file and a CSV.

It is free online and needs no sign-up or API key, because it does not use a routing service: distances are straight lines between the points on the globe. That makes it quick and private, but it also means the order ignores roads, rivers, traffic and opening hours. Use it to get a sensible sequence, then let your maps app work out the actual roads.

How to use the Multi-Stop Route Planner

1. Type or paste your stops, one per line. Use a city name (500+ cities are built in, including Indian cities with their old names such as Bangalore), “Name, latitude, longitude”, or a Google Maps link that contains coordinates.
2. Choose a round trip back to the start, a one-way route ending wherever is shortest, or a one-way route that must end at the last line.
3. Optionally set a detour factor and average speed for a rough road distance and driving time, and the minutes you spend at each stop.
4. Read the optimised order, the saving compared with the order you typed, and check the map.
5. Open the route in Google Maps, download a GPX for a navigation app, export a CSV, or press Rewrite my list in this order.

Multi-Stop Route Planner features

How the stop order is optimised

Finding the shortest route through many points is the travelling salesman problem. The number of possible orders grows very fast — 9 stops after the start have 362,880 orders, 15 have over a trillion — so beyond 9 the planner uses a heuristic. It starts with the nearest unvisited stop each time, then applies the 2-opt rule: if two legs of the route cross, reversing the section between them removes the crossing and shortens the route. It repeats until no reversal helps. On typical lists this lands within a few per cent of the best possible order.

Distances use the haversine formula on a sphere of 6,371 km, the same as the Distance Calculator. The detour factor multiplies the total to estimate road distance; the time is that distance at your average speed plus the minutes per stop.

Limits to keep in mind

• Straight-line distance can mislead where a river, a mountain range or the sea separates two close stops — check the order in a maps app.
• Time windows, delivery priorities, vehicle capacity and traffic are not considered.
• Google Maps accepts up to 9 waypoints in a directions link (3 in mobile browsers), so long routes open as several consecutive links.
• For the order of a flying trip across continents, the Great Circle Route Map shows the real flight paths.
• To turn the order into a road trip — road distances per leg, the drive split into days, overnight and fuel stops and the total cost — use the road trip planner (press “Rewrite my list in this order”, then copy the list).