The Travellist's journal

By TheTravellist

Searching for satay man

It amazes me that Google haven't made a decent travel app to replace TripAdvisor and other poorly designed alternatives. It would be so easy for one of the existing apps to allow users to add more information about restaurants and hotels (like Yelp and Foursquare do, but the former isn't available out here and the latter isn't used enough). Opening hours, menus, prices and most importantly location. Almost every day I have trouble finding somewhere because the location is wrong on either TripAdvisor, Google or both! A lot of the time the address is even wrong. This could be so easily fixed by allowing users to set the location themselves (it could ask if you're at the location and then use your phone's GPS). A business could override their own location and set it manually if they wanted to but most businesses out here don't care (or know) about any of that.

The reason I mention all of that now is that I wasted a fair amount of time looking for a place that just serves satay (called 'sate' here, one of the most popular foods in the country). This time Google Maps, TripAdvisor and Foursquare had different locations listed and all were wrong. It took asking about 5 people for me to finally find it.

It was worth the effort though. I had a mixture of chicken, beef and lamb with some rice, peanut sauce and a thick soy sauce. It was all cooked perfectly by this guy.

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