The cycle.travel app can’t do that yet – it can download the basemap for use offline, but not your actual route. It’s on the to-do list!

Thanks so much Richard! I love the site and loved your description of Swiss part of the Rhine route! What I will do is download it onto something else for meantime which lets me use en route. Head off tomorrow. First time cycling abroad..so excited! 

Enjoy – it’s a great route!

Assuming your mobile connects to a European network you should still be fine – most places along the route will have reception so you can still load your route into the c.t app.

Thanks! I loved your descriptions. Been using your site for years but only plucked up courage to go abroad this year.  I am on Lebara so it works fine abroad so can do that.  Thanks again!  Hopefully the first of more routes abroad for me! Thanks for inspiring me.

To Richard: thank you for your work on this. The ability to store the route while on wifi and then access the route offline would be a really key economic feature for me as a 4/5g data subscription on a iphone is a big expense commitment and not otherwise necessary to access the GPS functionality of a second hand iphone. I have bought you a coffee, become a supporter, in the hope this might become possible.  I find myself downloading loads of maps in loads of apps, all in the search for an offline route memory and turn by turn, which would probably take less room on the device. 

To Angie: might you tell me what app you use to store routes offline, and does it do turn by turn?

The expense for data isn't the only consideration.  I guess minimising power consumption is helped by only having the device working GPS only, and dumping out 4g, bluetooth, wifi and what not.  All I want is that the screen wakes up approaching a turn and a voice says "in 400 meters..", then goes dumb and dark after.

If I start a saved route while I still have wifi on at home that can sometimes work with cycle.travel app but it is temperamental.  It won't work for a group ride starting from a specific place away from my wifi.  And even when it works at the start it can dump me without routing mid ride if I need to change route, if I stop on route for a while and the device realises it has no wifi, if I turn the wifi off to save battery etc etc. These are all reasons why developing offline device route store functionality would be on your list, but my add to the conversation is, it would turn "close" into "cigar" and shower you in Oscars, or whatever the nav app equivalent is.  When people discard their latest iphones a lot of capable gps hardware rolls down to us techno poor but it needs someone designing software with that kind of user in mind.  Imagine there's NO DATA CONNECTION, like John Lennon sang.

There are apps that will charge for the functionality, and they essentially price to emmulate the price structure of the roaming data connection on an iphone: so, subscription only, monthly or yearly.  This seems exploitative.  If one accessed the same potential of the same hardware inside a dedicated GPS device, that would be a one off payment. But why buy another box of chips when all of that physical stuff is already in your secondhand iphone that you paid £50 to put a new battery in? It seems like pricing structures compel resource wastage.  Reuse repurpose recycle.  I'd pay another £50 to get my iphone the software that makes it useful in the same way a dedicated gps is, but as a one off, like buying a device, not as nightly rent for a waterside AirBnB.

@DAVIDROBJANT

I'm like you and have no mobile data either – just Wi-Fi. And a repurposed second-hand phone…

Magic Earth navigation by General Magic has offline maps (and their privacy policy seems OK). Therefore, until the ability to use your cycle.travel routes offline is added to the cycle.travel apps, you could plan your routes with cycle.travel; then download your cycle.travel routes as GPX track files; then open the GPX file stored locally on your device in Magic Earth for navigation on your bike with no internet.

I'm unable to give instructions for iPhones as I don't have one to test, however I assume it will be a similar process on iPhone to the screenshots below.

This will work for some using the cycle.travel app. If you are staying on established cycle routes, then you can just download the base map data for the area you are cycling through, and then that includes the cycling routes, so then just make sure your GPS marker stays on the dotted line (designating a bike path) as you travel.