Apple Maps Will Help You Find Restaurants Rated by Experts
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Apple is supercharging its Guides feature in Apple Maps. This week, the company announced that it’s bringing in “expert sources” to make it even easier to get reliable and credible recommendations when searching for hotels, restaurants, golf courses, and other travel venues.
When Apple first rolled out Apple Maps in 2012, the closest thing it had to a recommendation engine for tourist destinations was its integration with Yelp. That wasn’t too bad for getting user-to-user recommendations in its heyday, but it’s fair to say that Yelp has fallen by the wayside over the years.
About five years ago, it became apparent that Apple was working to address that issue. The company began hiring writers and editors to craft travel recommendations in early 2020, which ultimately contributed to the new Guides feature that came to iOS 14 later that year.
As the name implies, Guides was designed to offer a curated experience that helps users find great places to eat, shop, and explore — both in their own backyard and while traveling to new places. Users could save Guide pages for later, such as when planning a trip, and they can automatically update as new places and tips are added.
In early 2021, it looked like Apple was preparing to kick Yelp to the curb by adding user-contributed content to Apple Maps, allowing anyone with an Apple Account to rate places and add photos directly to businesses and other points of interest in Apple Maps.
Still, both of these solutions lacked one crucial piece of the puzzle: clear information from highly trusted expert sources. User reviews are just the average person’s opinion. Plus, while Apple’s Guides brought in editorially curated reviews and articles from local news sources and bloggers, they still tended to be more grassroots in nature.
That’s not entirely a bad thing, of course. Lots of folks undoubtedly prefer recommendations and thoughts from everyday people and not just the professionals. However, that can be hit or miss sometimes.
MICHELIN, Green Star, and More
That’s why Apple is upping its game by adding insights, ratings, and reviews from expert sources and improving its search features to help you find and filter them.
As of this week, users in the US can search for MICHELIN-starred, Green Star, and Bib Gourmand restaurants, as well as MICHELIN Key hotels. The Infatuation and Golf Digest will be added to Maps at some point in the future, with more expert sources to follow. Apple also plans to expand this to other regions, but there’s no word on when that will happen.
In the meantime, Apple has highlighted curated Maps Guides from MICHELIN Guide, The Infatuation, and Golf Digest.
Apple is also adding these to the search filters in Maps to help you narrow down a list of venues to only those with specific ratings or reviews by these expert sources. Apple Maps place cards will also display this information prominently, where available, so you can see it even when you’re just exploring a city digitally.
Select hotels, restaurants, and golf courses will also soon offer the ability to book rooms and schedule reservations and tee times through MICHELIN and Supreme Golf.
“MICHELIN Guide, The Infatuation, and Golf Digest are leading industry experts that consumers rely on for finding the best restaurants, hotels, and golf courses, and we’re excited to bring their valuable insights and accolades to our users in Apple Maps,” said David Dorn, Apple’s senior director of Internet Software and Services Product. “These new integrations make Maps an even more useful and seamless resource for users to discover great new places whether in their hometown or traveling somewhere new.”
