If you hear about a cool little restaurant, save it. Neat museum? Save it. I definitely can’t remember all the cool places I hear about, so I just save them immediately on my Google Maps. For some big cities I’ve visited a few times, I have little flags all over the place. You can put together your own little walking tours or pop into places around the corner you otherwise wouldn’t have noticed.
This is a great tip and I do it too! My maps have random points all over - from castle ruins in Scotland I read about in a book to a fascinating New York toilet I heard about in a podcast once.
Often I forget where these saved locations on a map come from but it’s so fun to have some starting points, as random as they may be, when starting to plan a trip somewhere.
@Linden
What’s this New York toilet 
I believe it’s the public bathroom of Bryant Park. Listen to the Atlas Obscura podcast, episode NYC’s Most Beautiful Public Bathroom, it’s a mesmerising story.
@Linden
And usually a long line to use it!
@Linden
The real tip is always in the comments!
@Linden
If you save it as “want to go” or any category other than starred you can leave notes. I created categories for food and hotels.
This is something I’ve been doing for several years. When saving places of interest, you can also add a brief note which helps me recall why I added it. For example, if it’s a restaurant, I’ll note that people rave about specific dishes or other important facts about the establishment.
@Sage
I always write down happy hour hours 
Yup. In google maps you can make lists. I have one for Mexican restaurants, one for Indian restaurants, one called Yum to save all other cuisine types, one for spots around town to take kids to see Halloween decorations and one for Christmas decorations…
I’m getting ready to retire. I was a young mother and only had a couple years to live like a kid/young adult. An online map is great but I wanted something I could physically see. So I’ve bought a large paper map. I’m going to adhere to cork board and build a legend using different colors of pins, like green for outdoor activities, green for restaurants, etc. I keep my list in OneNote so far, but I need to switch to Excel. I also have a huge framed world map that has glass and I’m using a marker to put little dots everywhere I’ve been or just to see places in reference to other places in the world I’m interested in going. Adding all my pins and dots to these maps will show me where my road trips and journeys will take me. I’m so excited like a little kid!! Yes I’m saving all ideas, but going old school.
@Eden
Ohhh I love that.
And also add a note when you save it, or create separate lists. Otherwise you’ll have a bunch of random stuff flagged and won’t always remember why you saved some of it.
How do you do it, pls?
Yep. There’s a bakery somewhere in the city centre of York that I absolutely loved but I cannot for the life of me remember its name. FML
I have switched to making notes about all kinds of random stuff now; you never know.
@Whit
I use the Google timeline now so I always remember which places I ate or went and can always find them again if need be.
I usually only write them down as a note, since my Google Maps is already cluttered. I don’t need hundreds of places I might never visit there as well. I have every attraction I visited marked with yellow stars (more than 900 currently), so if you look at the map you see where I traveled before. Also, if I revisit a place, it’s good to know what I’ve seen before. When I plan my next trip, I mark the attractions with blue (travel plan) and hotels with hearts. I clear all blue and hearts when I leave a city and only leave the starred places I visited.
@Dallas
Your yellow star map is technically saved on your timeline and would prevent the clutter if you’ve enabled it (not always accurately but I would’ve just edited my timeline). Moreover, you can ‘not show’ a saved list on your map when you don’t want to see them so that they don’t clutter your map until you’re looking for that category of stuff.
@Lyle
Google changed the timeline. It’s now on device only, so I cannot see it on the web anymore. In the past, timeline was not updating if you didn’t have internet access for days. It is also often not that accurate and it’s a pain to figure out if you visited that church or not.