Hello, fellow Local Guides,
I’m Parthiban from Chennai, India. To me, the importance of the local guide is like travelling/having a local person from a new place that I’m going to visit. It takes you to hidden gems of the locality. Unlike following the 15 best places to eat in a blog, this gives you glimpses of all the local favourites. I used to write food reviews in Zomato in the past, but it is limited to food and user base was less so was the number of people who discover what I write.
The below quick story is how I found an amazing place and shared it to the community.
Before getting into the answer, let me give a snippet about myself, I’m a huge foodie and I’ve always loved exploring cuisines. I don’t stick to the same cuisine twice on the same day and I try to visit the not so popular shops or restaurants just to check out their food. When I find such great shops/cuisines the first thing I do is share with my friends and acquaintance, I’ve always wanted to come up with a blog but sometimes it takes a lot more effort to create/write/maintain a blog and that’s the exact problem google maps solved for people like me. They try and connect people who are looking for the same specific thing with less to minimal effect.
I still remember when I first used my android to use google maps and try to locate a local restaurant which has the best vada’s in the whole city, I was impressed and just as everyone reviewed the vada’s were the best, this got me curious and wanted me to help people finding things that I really loved. That got me writing a ton of reviews and posting photos of restaurants/dishes, localities etc. This is the reason why I’m passionate in the whole world locating things that I’m a huge fan of.
Perks!!
Being a beta tester has its own perk. I really loved the AR mode in maps, I always had this confusion on directions the new AR guiding is unbelievably cool.