Offline maps done properly, and the backup for when they fail
Downloading a map is thirty seconds of work that removes most of the ways a travel day goes wrong. Here is how to do it on both platforms, and what offline maps still cannot do.
onesim team
Navigation is the cheapest thing you do on a phone abroad — around 5 MB an hour with the map open — so offline maps are not really about saving data. They are about the twenty minutes when you have none: in a tunnel, on a rural road, in a basement metro station, or in the ninety seconds after you land before the travel line registers.
It takes half a minute per city. Do it before you fly.
Google Maps
Search the city, tap its name at the bottom of the screen, then the three dots, then Download offline map. You get a rectangle you can resize before confirming — drag it to cover the airport and any day trips, not just the old town.
Or: your profile picture → Offline maps → Select your own map, which lets you draw the area first.
Downloads expire after about a year and refresh themselves over Wi-Fi. In Offline maps → settings you can force them to update on Wi-Fi only, which you want.
What works offline: searching for places, driving directions, saved places, and your own location.
What does not: live traffic, public transport routing, walking directions in some regions, cycling directions, Street View, and anything that needs a review or a photo.
Apple Maps
Search the city, tap its name in the card, then Download — or go to your account picture → Offline Maps → Download New Map and adjust the rectangle.
Apple added this relatively recently and it now covers driving, walking and cycling directions offline, plus place details and opening hours, which is more than Google's offline mode does for walking.
Under Offline Maps you can also set Only Use Offline Maps, which forces the phone to ignore the network entirely — useful when you have a tiny package and want to be certain nothing streams.
The third option, and why it is worth having
Organic Maps and OsmAnd are free, open-source apps built on OpenStreetMap. They download a whole country for a few hundred megabytes, they work with no account and no connection at all, and their walking and hiking data in rural areas is often far better than either big platform — footpaths, trail markings, water sources, mountain huts.
If your trip involves anything outside a city — the Albanian Riviera's beach tracks, a Greek island's footpaths, a national park — put one of these on the phone as well. They are the backup that does not depend on anybody's servers.
The things to save that are not maps
Offline maps solve navigation. They do not solve any of the following, and all of them are one screenshot away from being solved:
Save these to the phone before you fly
- The address of your accommodation, in the local language and script
- Your booking references and check-in times
- Boarding passes in the wallet app rather than in an email
- Any confirmation numbers you might have to read aloud
- Your travel insurance policy number and emergency line
- A photo of your passport's photo page, stored somewhere you can reach without data
The address in the local script matters more than people expect. A taxi driver in Tokyo, Athens or Tbilisi can read an address in their own alphabet off your screen in two seconds; a transliteration may mean nothing to them.
Translation, offline
Both Google Translate and Apple Translate download language packs for offline use, including the camera mode that reads a menu through the lens. Google Translate: the language list → the download arrow beside each language. Apple Translate: Settings → Translate → Downloaded Languages.
Download the language of the country you are going to, and English, before you leave. The camera translation is the single most useful travel feature on a modern phone and it works with the aeroplane in the air.
Public transport, which offline maps handle worst
This is the honest gap. Offline maps give you walking and driving; they are much weaker on buses, trams and metros, which is exactly what you need in a city you have just landed in.
Three things fill it:
- Citymapper covers around a hundred cities and caches enough to be useful on a weak connection, including the metro map and the line diagrams.
- The operator's own app is usually the most accurate for live disruption — TfL Go in London, the regional apps in German-speaking countries, Moovit across southern Europe and Latin America.
- A screenshot of the metro map. Unglamorous, weighs nothing, and works when everything else does not. Take it before you fly.
The one thing no offline map gives you is a live departure or a cancellation, and that is the information that actually changes what you do. It is the argument for having a small amount of working data rather than relying entirely on downloads: offline maps are the safety net, not the plan.
And the actual backup
Have one paper thing. A hotel business card, an address written down, a printed boarding pass on a long connection. Phones get lost, stolen, dropped in water and run out of battery, and a card in a pocket has never once failed to work.
