While building out Clean Travel Club and thinking about how I wanted to search for restaurants, I came up with a design pattern that I wished other sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor had: grouping multiple locations of the same restaurant chain in the search results, and showing them all on the map.

Let’s say you’re on a flight to San Francisco where you’ll be staying in the Marina, and you search for “salad.”

You see a place called “Blue Barn” that looks pretty good. Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a trek from where you’re staying.

But really, there are three Blue Barn locations, and two of them would be much more convenient for you. Here’s Google Maps showing where they are:

So I thought: why doesn’t Yelp bundle all the Blue Barns into a single result on the search page and highlight all of them on the map, so the user can find the one that is most convenient for them?

And that’s what I built into Clean Travel Club:

Clean Travel Club Blue Barn search result

It’s pretty simple:

  • Combine all the locations of a chain that meet the search criteria into a single result
  • Show them all on the map and highlight them together when the user hovers over the search result
  • Create a chain-specific page (here’s Blue Barn’s) where you can see just that chain’s locations and click through to the specific one you want.

Of course, if there’s only one location that meets the search location and criteria, that result is shown as a typical solo listing. But if there are multiple locations that all meet the search criteria, why not show them all in case one is more convenient? They’re the same chain, after all.

Yelp, TripAdvisor, OpenTable — can you please copy this pattern?

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