Google Maps Could Be the Do-It-All Restaurant App of the Future
Photo Caption: Google Maps is quickly becoming a one-stop digital destination for customer interactions with restaurants.
Skift Take
Google Maps has become a daily must-use for plenty of people. As its parent company looks further into the restaurant business, Maps could become an indispensable superapp for the future of restaurants.
As rumors surfaced last month that reservations platform Resy was up for sale, Google was on our short list of best guesses as to a potential buyer. The company's dominance in local search and discovery is well-proven, and its interest in the restaurant business has only increased in recent years.
“When I’m in a city or in a place that I’m not familiar with, I’m opening Google Maps. I’m not opening anything else, and I think that I’m not unique in that way,” Resy CEO Ben Leventhal said at Skift Restaurants Forum in September. “I think that’s the point: the funnel has changed. You used to have a service like OpenTable at the top of the funnel, and it turns out that Google’s at the top of the funnel now."
Resy has denied reports of an impending sale. But Google, and increasingly, Google Maps, remains a vital part of the company's interest in the restaurant business.
Skift on Tuesday published a deep dive into Google Maps, comparing it to the lines of so-called supe
