Last week at the Location Business Summit in San Jose I moderated a session called “Winning & Losing in Mobile Advertising: What brands, agencies, and developers really need to know.” The event was held at the Hyatt Place hotel in San Jose.
I was unfamiliar with this hotel so before I drove there I checked Apple Maps on my iPhone. It didn’t have the location at all. I tried to find it a few different ways before I had to input the street address, 282 Almaden Boulevard San Jose, to get turn-by-turn directions from Apple.
My Mapquest app didn’t have it, nor did Telenav/Scout. (In the right screen below [Mapquest] there’s an ad that would have probably led me to the correct location.) Google was the one site/app out of the several I tried that did find the correct location for “Hyatt Place, San Jose.”
When I got to the hotel I discovered that the conference was being held at the same venue as in past years. The hotel had been a “Crowne Plaza” and now it was a “Hyatt Place.” The location was the same, just the name had changed.
Talking to some people after my session I discovered a number of others had the same problem initially locating the hotel on their smartphones and, like me, eventually had to enter the address. One person remarked that the hotel had changed brands in February (call it Q1) of this year. So these mapping apps had several months to “recover” and get the new data into the system — but evidently had not yet.
As I mentioned, Google was the only one that had the correct data. However, when I sought to recreate the whole experience earlier today so I could write about it I discovered that Apple Maps also now has the correct listing. So in the roughly three days since my initial Hyatt Place search it was addressed on Apple Maps. The others, however, were still missing the data.
If this three day turnaround is an indication of the speed with which Apple Maps is dealing with its data problems generally it’s a good sign.
October 22nd, 2012 at 12:44 pm
[...] really raised her profile.Hotel Name Change: Google Maps Gets It Right but Apple Corrects Quickly (ScreenWerk) Greg Sterling: Google was the only one that had the correct data. However, when I sought to [...]
October 23rd, 2012 at 11:55 pm
If only owners of the information (in this case the hotel) could and then would update all the information in one place…..
Google would have it right as they are not only search but also a hotel “booking” engine.
October 25th, 2012 at 3:51 pm
Yp.com has the correct info…
October 25th, 2012 at 4:41 pm
Glad they’ve corrected it.