What you need to know
- Yelp is going to let businesses list whether they have specific COVID-19 vaccination requirements.
- Apple Maps uses Yelp to provide business information and will likely benefit from this move.
Yelp is going to allow businesses to update their listings to note whether they have any specific COVID-19 vaccination requirements, the company has announced.
According to a report by The Verge, Yelp will also allow businesses to list whether their staff members are full vaccinated as well.
With Apple Maps using Yelp for its business information, you have to assume that it too will benefit from these changes. This also isn't the first pandemic-related change that Yelp has made, either. But as with other changes, Yelp is aware that some people could take to its service to review bomb businesses that require vaccinations — an issue it intends to deal with.
Vaccination policies have become controversial in some circles, so Yelp is also emphasizing the moderation work it does to prevent businesses from being review-bombed as a result of their choices. It says it's proactively monitoring the pages of businesses that choose to display these policies, and that it will remove reviews that focus on them rather than a customer's actual experience with a business. Over the course of 2021, Yelp says it's removed thousands of reviews for violating its COVID Content Guidelines.
All of this will of course require businesses to update their pages, otherwise nothing will really change. Let's hope that's something business owners get around to doing — especially in areas of the world where the COVID-19 might not be as straightforward and under control as others.
