Google maps or Mapquest for Shanghai?
 

I was looking up the locations and directions for 2 hotels in Shanghai (Park Hyatt and Shangri-la) on Google maps and Mapquest. Each hotel appears to be located differently on Google maps vs Mapquest. Can anyone advise which site is more accurate (if either)?
Thank you.

I didn't even realise that Mapquest was around anymore. Google Maps is generally fairly accurate for major landmarks such as well-known hotels and subway stations, though it is off by a bit somewhat frequently.

Baidu is probably your best bet in terms of accuracy, but is Chinese only. The new Apple maps is surprisingly good for China as well, even while being utter crap for the rest of the world.

For something useable in English, use this version, which is more accurate than regular Google maps: (there is no "www" in the URL address)
http://ditu.google.com
This site will accept searches in English, pinyin and hanzi.

Forget Mapquest entirely.

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

Google map is quite accurate in Chian.

Go to the hotel local websites. They should have a printable map with the correct location.

Google maps was very accurate for me in both Shanghai & Beijing when I visited in April.

When comparing mainland addresses in Baidu and Google, Baidu has been the only correct one, IME.

Doing a search for "Chunfeng Lu" (春风路) in Shenzhen, Google sends me to Hong Kong (while claiming the marker is in mainland China)...whereas Baidu shows me the length of said street, in Shenzhen.

Agreed - but in your example the main problem is not the location of the marker - but that the map is very out of date.

Baidu is certainly my first choice to look up for locations - but not very helpful for those who can't read Chinese. The <ditu.google.com> link posted above by jiejie would also be my recommendation as it usually gives good results (for your example of 春风路 it shows the correct location and the up-to-date road layout) and has labelling in English.

Indeed they should but it is alarming how many hotel web-sites in China have "maps" that are either very approximate schematics or contain errors. Some examples:

Hilton Beijing East 3rd Ring Road: location correct on schematic - but scale is way too small given that a 1-block in Beijing can be a 20 minute walk...

Park Hyatt: Location about correct but uses a Bing map that puts the hotel next to a road called "Chaoyangmennon ST". The "non" part doesn't even exist as a syllable in Chinese - and in fact this the East 2nd Ring Road.

Peninsula Hotel: Hard even to find the map on their web-site but when you do the location is about correct, but uses a schematic that has Tiananmen square marked as being north of Chang'anjie (amongst other errors)

Agreed with above. Google maps is usually good enough, but it can get things spectacularly wrong. Always best to double check with other landmarks nearby aswell (e.g. hotel restaurant has separate listing).

tb

Thank you all for the advice. I was able to make it work on Google maps with the help of the http://ditu.google.com. I had to type in the actual address for the Park Hyatt. I had the hotel send me a "Taxi card" as I've seen mentioned on the forum (another wonderful tip on this site). I like to study maps of places I will be traveling to in order to familiarize myself with the location.

Another good place to double-check is http://shmap.city8.com/

It's basically StreetView for China.

The map is out of date? Placing it in a completely different location (HK v. China) is more than an issue of the map being archaic.

Ah, didn't know about ditu.google.com. I always use local language maps too, because if I'm lost, how is English going to help in Taegu or Tbilisi, and when there's no four star-hotel in sight?

I tested your road on the google maps app on my iphone by typing in 深圳市春风路 and google maps took me right there without any problems. Strange.

I find Google maps to be very accurate in big cities of China and it's especially helpful when deciding whether to walk or take the subway in Beijing since distances can be so great in the capital city.

It's not always accurate. I can attest that when I was trying to go the Park Hyatt about a year ago, it took me to some alley, about 1 km north of the actual location. A quick search now shows that particular error is now fixed. Which suggests that the mapping errors in big cities will be picked up and fixed, whereas that might not the case in smaller towns.

tb

It's somewhat odd. I tried it again on maps.google.com, and it took me to Hong Kong.

Then I tried it on ditu.google.com, and it worked, but the neighborhood name is Man Kam To...correct, if one was in Hong Kong. In Mandarin, it's Wen Jin Du.

一模一样, not so much