notsosureDo the ratings on Google Maps have any correlation with the quality of the businesses?
For a lot of businesses, typically the kind that most people don’t generally review, a good rating doesn’t really mean anything, a bad rating might if there’s a few of them.
For restaurants, cafes and bars it depends where you are. Every area will have one or two sites/apps where most people typically review these kinds of business. So in some areas Google reviews are a pretty good gauge of things, in others they’re basically useless.
The other thing to figure out is what “good” actually is for a given area, because a 4.7 in some areas could mean one of the best meals you ever have, and in others it could just be an average rating.
Whenever I’m traveling to a new area and looking for that kind of thing, I can usually find people talking about the above for a given area either on travel forums (or places like Reddit) or by watching a few travel vlogs focused on food options, where it often comes up as a topic.
Edit: clarity, don’t just use “place” to mean all three of area, business and website in every instance, kids!
One trick on ratings is to sort by date. The most recent reviews are more likely to be reality, as opposed to the common bot-farm positive reviews. It still won’t help you identify if customers aren’t likely to leave reviews, however.
🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 This is also generally good advice anyway, since a place can go from good to bad or bad to good over time. There is a gas station near me that has a pretty obvious point in which it went from pretty decent to utter shit, and it’s when the current owner took over.
venusaur