Getting your hotel found on Google Maps — an owner's guide

When a foreign tourist plans a night in your town, the search almost always starts in one place: Google Maps. Not your website, not a brochure — the map. If your property is missing, half-filled, or only in Mongolian, you are invisible at the exact moment a booking is decided. Here is the checklist we run for every EPAX client, written so you can do the basics yourself.

Claim it, complete it, keep one name

First, claim your Business Profile so you control what travelers see. Then complete every field: category, hours, phone, photos, amenities, and an English description written for travelers, not for locals. Use exactly one spelling of your business name everywhere — on Maps, on Booking.com, on Instagram, on your sign. Search engines treat every variant as a different business, and your reviews split across them.

Photos decide before words do

Listings with fresh, real photos get dramatically more direction requests than empty ones. Upload real rooms, real food, real mornings — and refresh them at least monthly in season. A photo from 2019 quietly tells a traveler your information cannot be trusted.

Answer everything, in English

Reviews and questions on your listing are public conversations. A property that answers — quickly, politely, in English — reads as alive and well-run. A five-star average with silent management loses to a 4.5 with responsive management more often than owners believe.

The details tourists actually check

Accurate pin location (drive to it yourself and check), arrival instructions, seasonal hours, and a booking link that works on a phone. Each one of these is a place where we regularly find bookings quietly leaking away.

Doing this well takes a few hours to set up and steady attention every week — that is the honest cost. If you would rather have it handled, platform presence is exactly what our Starter plan covers, and the free audit will show you today's gaps within 24 hours.