Mapquest Route Planner for Deliveries

4 min readAug 6, 2020

As a small home delivery business, you may be looking at tools like Google Maps Route Planner or Mapquest Route Planner to organize your day-to-day deliveries. Both are great options, especially if you are making less than 20 deliveries per day. But, how do you get the most out of these tools?

In this article, we will be going through how to use Mapquest Route Planner and optimize your delivery schedule for small batches.

What is Mapquest Route Planner?

Mapquest Route Planner is a route optimization tool built by Mapquest. If you are already familiar with Mapquest, this is a great option for smaller groups of deliveries. In fact there are a ton of wonderful resources available to help you get started with here. But there are a few things to note before diving into Mapquest Route Planner.

You can only plan routes for one driver at a time,
There is a maximum of 26 destinations per route
There is no option to optimize with common constraints such as delivery time window, driver breaks, load capacity, etc.

Even with those things in mind, many businesses choose Mapquest Route Planner to help plan and optimize their routes. Here’s how they do it.

How do I use Mapquest Route Planner?

Using Mapquest Route Planner is a great way to optimize routes and save time for small batches of deliveries. Here are the steps to follow:

Input your Addresses

When it comes to inputting your addresses, you have three options in Mapquest Route Planner:

Line by Line
Copy/Paste
Import

Line by Line

With Line by Line, you are given several fields to populate with individual addresses. As you begin typing, your addresses are cross-referenced with the Mapquest database to give you suggestions for pinpoint accuracy.

You start with two fields available. To add more stops, click on “Add another Stop”. You can repeat this process multiple times to a maximum of 26 stops.

Copy/Paste

With Copy/Paste, you are given a blank field with multiple lines available for you to paste addresses into. This option is ideal if you have kept the addresses in the form of a list.

When pasting, keep each stop on one line, to a maximum of 26 lines.

Import

With Import, you are able to upload a list of multiple addresses in the form of a spreadsheet. You can either drag and drop the file right on to the box provided, or click on the “Browse” button to locate the file on your device.

Mapquest also provides templates for you to ensure your information is formatted correctly.

Once you’ve imported all of your addresses for the delivery, it’s time to customize your route with Route Options.

Set your Route Options

Mapquest Route Planner offers a few route options to customize how your route is optimized. These options include:

Optimize for shortest distance or shortest time
Allow Mapquest to re-order routes
Making the route a round-trip or not

Optimizing for shortest distance or shortest time with Mapquest Route Planner

You have the option to choose to optimize your route by distance or time, depending on your business goals and strategy.

Allowing Mapquest Route Planner to Re-Order Stops

By selecting this option, you give Mapquest permission to further optimize your route by changing the order that your drivers would visit them. This means that the order you input the addresses in step one, can change.

Making the route a round-trip

This option automatically adds the first stop of your route to the end of your trip to ensure that the driver ends where they began. By selecting this option, it allows for the route to be optimized in its entirety, with the trip back, included.

Once you’ve finished with the Route Options, it’s time to look at your Route Settings.

Route Settings

Your Route Settings are important bits of information that will be factored into Mapquest’s route optimization. They are basic constraints that you would find in most mapping and GPS software, like the ability to avoid toll roads, highways, or ferries, for example.