For those of us in the Bay Area, Yelp is a pretty well known and well used web service. We use it to check out new restaurants, and even find new service providers, such as doctors, hair stylists, massage therapists and plumbers. If you’re not familiar with Yelp, it’s similar to an online Yellow Pages, which allows anyone to post unedited reviews on pretty much any type of business in your city or town. You can then search Yelp to find highly rated businesses and restaurants.
After throwing out some of the extreme flames on just about any establishment (there’s always at least one person who was having a bad day when they visited and took out their aggravation in their Yelp review) you can get a pretty accurate quality rating of pretty much any type of business in the area.
I recently discovered another way to use Yelp that I’d never really thought of. On my recent trip to Maui, an island I’ve never visited, the Yelp application on my iPhone pretty much made my trip. (If you happen to have an iPhone, Yelp becomes much more useful.) If you don’t have an iPhone, there’s a mobile web version available at: http://mobile.yelp.com/ which works on the Blackberry, as well as most mobile phones with a web browser.
On my iPhone, I just clicked the “Nearby” button, and the type of food I wanted, and Yelp gave me really accurate ratings, locations, Google maps and phone numbers based on proximity.
Once installed, this app requires virtually no technical knowledge on your part, which is one of my top criteria for a recommendation. It’s so intuitive that you can give it to someone who’s never used the iPhone and they can figure out how to use it in a few minutes. Yelp uses the built-in GPS on your iPhone 3G, or the cell tower triangulation feature on the old model to determine your location.
Overall, we found some incredible little spots, some of them really inexpensive on an island known as one of the most expensive in Hawaii. We never would have found these places without Yelp. We were also able to avoid the overpriced tourist joints that were recommended to us by some of the local businesses.
Both the Yelp website and the iPhone application are completely free. I’ll be using them faithfully on all my future trips.
