Zagat.com Relaunches With More Free Content Including Maps, Lists, Third-Party Reviews
Zagat is now allowing users to surface reviews in an easier way with enhanced search capabilities. New interactive maps allow diners to search by clicking on any neighborhood, drawing an area on a map, or indicating a popular landmark. Zagat has also compiled hundreds of lists of restaurants based on editor picks, and other topics, which users can access for free.
With the updated site, Zagat is encouraging users to build up restaurant profiles with photos. Members can now upload photos of dishes and restaurants and view photos submitted by others. And Zagat has added a new metric, a simple “like,” to show users the percentage of diners in Zagat’s community that enjoyed a particular establishment.
Zagat co-founder Nina Zagat said in the release announcing the new version of the site, “Zagat has always been a brand powered by people and passion. Having listened to our users, we’ve re-envisioned ZAGAT.com…We’ve greatly expanded our free content, Buzz dining blogs and innovative search tools as a result. The free content allows any user to get search results as potent as anywhere else on the web. We have an ambitious plan for the site’s future and will launch more exciting features in the coming months.”
Premium members still have access to Zagat’s full-fledged reviews, but now any user can surface more useful information about a restaurant or bar. For Zagat, this is a huge upgrade in terms of its digital offerings. In order to compete with sites like Yelp, the company had to not only free up content but also add more interactive elements (i.e. badges, photos) to encourage users to add content to the site.
But is it too little, too late for Zagat? In January, Yelp drew 26 million unique visitors in the U.S., according to comScore, whereas Zagat only saw 269,000 unique visitors in the same time period (according to a New York Times report, Zagat has roughly 1.2 million users worldwide). While Zagat Survey has a trusted name when it comes to quality restaurant reviews, Yelp, CitySearch, and even Google Places have long been offering free reviews and content to the public for some time now. Partnerships and more free content will certainly help Zagat draw traffic, but it’s unclear if reputation alone will help Zagat reach the mass scale that Yelp has been able to achieve.