How to Get Your Bus Routes on Trip Planners

Why Trip Planner Listings Matter

When a rider wants to travel from point A to point B, their first stop is a trip planner — Google Maps, Apple Maps, or one of dozens of regional apps. If your routes are not in those apps, those riders do not know you exist. No listing means no passengers.

The good news is that all of these apps use the same open data format: GTFS. Create one GTFS feed and you can be listed on every major trip planner in the world. This guide explains how.

Which Apps Can List Your Routes?

Any app that consumes GTFS data can list your routes. The two most important ones to target are:

  • Google Maps — The highest-priority listing for most agencies. Billions of searches per day. Free to submit via the Google Transit Partner Portal.
  • Apple Maps — Default navigation on all iPhones and iPads. Submit via Apple Maps Connect.

Beyond these two, dozens of regional and global trip planning apps also accept GTFS feeds. Once your feed is live and hosted at a public URL, you can submit it to any platform that accepts GTFS data.

The Impact of a Google Maps Listing

Transit agencies that publish their GTFS feed to Google Maps typically report a significant increase in ridership — new passengers who discovered the service through a journey planning search they would not have done otherwise.

The Three Steps to Getting Listed

Step 1 — Create a valid GTFS feed

All major trip planners use GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification) to ingest transit schedules. You need a properly formatted GTFS ZIP file containing your agency details, stops, routes, trips, and timetables. This is the universal key that opens the door to every trip planner listing.

If you do not have a GTFS feed yet, see our guide on how to create a GTFS feed from scratch. Once created, validate it thoroughly — a feed with errors will be rejected. See our GTFS validation guide for details.

Step 2 — Host your feed at a public URL

Trip planners need to fetch your GTFS feed on a regular basis to keep their data current. Your feed must be available at a stable, publicly accessible URL — for example https://youragency.com/gtfs.zip. This URL should not change once you submit it to trip planners, because you would need to update all your submissions if it does.

AddTransit provides permanent GTFS feed hosting, including the public URL you need for submissions.

Step 3 — Submit to each platform

Each trip planner has its own submission process. Most are free. The two highest-priority platforms are:

Platform Submission Method Processing Time
Google Maps Google Transit Partner Portal Days to weeks
Apple Maps Apple Maps Connect / direct contact Weeks to months

For Google Maps — the most important listing — see our dedicated guide: how to publish your GTFS feed to Google Maps.

For Apple Maps, see our guide on how to submit your GTFS feed to Apple Maps.

Maintaining Your Listings Long-Term

Getting listed is not a one-time task — it requires ongoing maintenance. Trip planners regularly re-fetch your feed; if it has expired or contains errors, your routes will disappear. Update your feed whenever:

Publish your updated feed before schedule changes take effect — not after. Google Maps typically takes 24–72 hours to ingest a new version.

GTFS: One Feed, Every Platform

The power of GTFS is that you create your data once and it works everywhere. Rather than maintaining separate data for Google, Apple, and every other trip planner, you maintain a single GTFS feed. Every platform fetches from the same URL. When you update your data, every platform gets the update at once.

AddTransit manages your GTFS feed through a single dashboard — enter your schedules once, and AddTransit generates, validates, and hosts your feed automatically. Your public feed URL stays constant, so your trip planner submissions never need to be updated.

Get your routes on every trip planner with AddTransit

Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. Submitting your GTFS feed to Google Maps, Apple Maps, and other trip planners is free. These platforms want transit data to improve their products — they do not charge agencies for listing. You may pay for software to create and manage your GTFS feed, but the submissions themselves are free.

Google Maps typically processes new submissions within a few days to a couple of weeks. Apple Maps takes longer — weeks to months. Other platforms vary. You can speed up Google's and Apple's approval by ensuring your feed is fully valid before submitting, with no errors and a current service calendar.

Yes, each platform has its own submission process. However, the data is the same — your single GTFS feed works for all of them. It is worth the effort to submit to as many as possible, as different riders use different apps. Google Maps is the highest priority, followed by Apple Maps.

The most common cause is an expired service calendar. Check your calendar.txt end_date — if it is in the past, update it to a future date, re-publish, and Google Maps should restore your listing within 24–72 hours. Other causes include validation errors introduced during an update, or a change in your feed URL that Google can no longer access.
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