Our holiday cottage appeared on Google Maps, complete with reviews by guests. Today I had a phone call from a Google Maps clerk: "Does your business have a 24 hour reception desk?"
My response was: "No, we meet and greet the guests, but are then available on 24 hour call if there are any problems." End of call.
Being naturally suspicious, about 30 minutes later I checked on Google Maps. Our holiday cottage business is no longer shown and the reviews have been wiped out. The national tax authority, HMRC, treat us as a business. The local council charge us business rates, and Google is happy to accept money from us for advertisements promoting the holiday home business.
Result? We've cancelled all advertising with Google with immediate effect for this cottage and our other businesses. The other major search engines do not have this problem. We'll also move our archival data storage from Google to Amazon AWS.
