What is A Grand Tour?
An overview of A Grand Tour and what you can do with it
A Grand Tour is a trip planning application designed for long-term overland expeditions. Whether you’re planning a year-long drive across continents or a multi-week road trip through several countries, A Grand Tour helps you organize every aspect of your journey.
What Makes It Different?
Most trip planners focus on flights and hotels. A Grand Tour is built for overland travel — the kind where you drive, ride, sail, and walk your way across the world.
- Multi-trip tours — Organize your journey into logical trips that span weeks or months
- Rich route planning — Plan routes with multiple transport modes: driving, cycling, walking, ferries, and more
- Curated reference data — Access a global database of points of interest, scenic routes, ferry crossings, and country information
- Interactive maps — Visualize your entire journey on a 3D globe with customizable map layers
- Geo-linked documents — Write travel notes with smart references that link to places, countries, and trips on your map
- Collaboration — Invite travel companions to view and edit your tour together
Who Is It For?
A Grand Tour is perfect for:
- Overlanders planning multi-country road trips
- Cycle tourers mapping out long-distance routes
- Backpackers organizing complex multi-leg journeys
- Travel planners managing group expeditions
Key Concepts
Before you dive in, here are the main building blocks:
Tours
A tour is the top-level container for your travel plans. Think of it as your entire expedition — for example, “Europe to Asia Overland” or “Pan-American Highway”.
Trips
Each tour contains one or more trips — logical segments of your journey. A trip might be “Turkey to Iran” or “Week 3: Patagonia”. Trips have start and end dates, and you can reorder them as your plans evolve.
Datasets
Datasets are collections of geographic data attached to your tour. Every tour comes with built-in datasets for countries, points of interest, scenic routes, ferries, and risk regions. You can customize these with your own additions and overrides.
Documents
Documents are rich-text notes attached to your tour. They support a special reference syntax that links to places and countries on your map — write [[country:JP|Japan]] and it becomes a clickable link that highlights Japan on your globe.
Getting Started
Ready to plan your adventure? Head to Creating Your Account to get started.