I visited Spain last summer and my family would typically just walk around where we were looking for a restaurant that seemed good, and almost always got stuck in tourist traps with bad Americanized food at high prices. When we started using Yelp to find places to eat we found little hole-in-the-wall tapas places with absolutely no American influence and amazing food that we still talk about to this day.
Yes, same here. I used Yelp during a US West Coast trip and always found good too great places to eat near any place we drove through. The highlight was finding an amazing, fresh Vietnamese on a concrete island in some random part of Fresno.
Their coverage is not uniform across different countries (Germany is not bad but still occasionally spotty) but it's a great filter of the crap restaurants.
Personally I've discovered quite a few restaurants that I enjoyed quite a bit thanks to Yelp. Google reviews are starting to become more common and comparable, but back then the Google reviews were very sparse and usually only people talking about bad experiences, whereas Yelp was more mixed.
Yelp remains very helpful to me in many ways. Looking up the restaurants in an area, filtering by various things (are they open? do they take reservations? what's the noise level?), making reservations, etc.
I know Yelp has a shady underbelly, but pretending that it doesn't have anything to offer is just being intellectually dishonest.
I have found Yelp to be better than Google Maps at telling me what the options are for grabbing a bite to eat nearby. I hardly ever read the reviews.
Actually, I used to read the Yelp complaints about the ice cream place near me, which had a famously cranky owner. Those often made me laugh; does that count as joy?
I think that we tend to only hear the horror stories. I've never really used yelp, but I know many that have and found it useful as at least a barometer of an area. I'm a contrarian so I find I'm happier if I don't know how others feel about things.
I disagree. Though it is not Yelp, I have seen business develop from customers who would have been out of reach to them if not for the Internet. Particularly in the hospitality business.
