If you are planning to travel you may want to have access to Google maps at your destination.  You could purchase a roaming data plan for your destination.  This is sometimes fraught with it’s own difficulties.  It can also be quite expensive.

There is a fairly straight-forward and free alternative to this.  Rather than have google retrieve map data in real-time, simply download the map data you need to your phone.  You can to this from home before you leave, from your hotel, or from where ever you have access to free wi-fi.

Here are the steps as shown in the attached screenshots:

1. Click on the “menu” icon in the upper left hand corner of your phone map page.
2. Select “Offline maps” from the menu.
3. Click on “Select your own map” to create a new area for download and offline use.
4. Use pan and zoom to define the area that you wish to download map data for.