Why map apps send you to different places for the same name

Arrival times can only be compared fairly when the apps are heading for the same point.

What happens to the name you type

A house number with a postcode can be placed on the building itself. A whole city can't, so someone has to decide which single point stands for it. OpenStreetMap's guidance, for example, puts that point roughly at the centre and, where there is one, at the town hall or main square. Other map makers set their own rules, so a route to 'Berlin' ends wherever that map's city point is, and two apps can finish the same trip in different streets.

The order of the suggestions matters too. Waze ranks search results first by your distance from them, then by how well they match what you typed, then by prominence and popularity. The same half-typed address can therefore bring up a different top suggestion in Graz than in Linz.

Big places have more than one right answer

Vienna Airport isn't in Vienna. It lies in Schwechat, about 18 km south-east of the city centre, and has several terminals and car parks, plus a drop-off ramp for departures. 'Vienna Airport' can end at any of these, and a drop-off needs a different point from a pick-up. The airport publishes its own navigation address, Einfahrtsstraße, 1300 Wien-Flughafen, and the Bratislava to Vienna Airport guide covers drop-off and parking.

Large railway stations are reached from several streets, and the tracks between them are hard to cross by car. At Vienna's main station, the railway lists taxi ranks in three separate places. A pin on 'Hauptbahnhof' can suit one of them and mean a drive around the station for the others, so search for the entrance or street you need.

Shopping centres work the same way. SCS in Vösendorf, which Wikipedia describes as Austria's largest, has more than 10,000 parking spaces and is about 1.6 km long, so 'SCS' as a destination says little about which car park you will reach. At stadiums and trade fairs, the gate or car park printed on your ticket is a better target than the venue's name.

Same street, different town

Street names repeat far more often than most drivers expect. Austria's address register (record date 1 April 2026) lists 695 streets called Hauptstraße, in 585 of the country's 2,092 municipalities, and the exact address Hauptstraße 1 appears 557 times.

Even street, number and municipality together are not always enough. In 44 Austrian municipalities there is more than one Hauptstraße 1, each in a different village of the same municipality. Harmannsdorf in Lower Austria has five, and four of them share one postcode. Only the village name tells them apart.

Place names repeat too. In Austria, 42 localities are called simply Au. Of Czechia's 6,254 municipalities, 1,501 share their exact name with at least one other. Germany has two Frankfurts, one of them on the Polish border about 80 km east of Berlin. Komárno in Slovakia and Komárom in Hungary were one town until the border drawn after the First World War split it. One careless tap in a suggestion list picks the wrong one.

Postcodes cross town lines

A postcode marks a delivery area. In Austria's register, 1,017 of the 2,232 postcodes in use cover addresses in more than one municipality. Vienna Airport shows the trap again: its postcode, 1300, looks like one of Vienna's, which run from 1010 to 1230, but every address with it lies in Schwechat.

When the parts of an address you type don't fit together, the app decides which part to believe. Google notes that partial matches happen most often when the street doesn't exist in the town given, so read the town and postcode under a suggestion before you tap it.

How to send every app to the same spot

1. Type the full address with postcode and town, plus the village name where there is one and the country near a border. 'Hauptstraße 1, 2000 Stockerau' leaves far less room for guessing than 'Hauptstraße 1'.
2. Pick a suggestion instead of pressing Enter. Suggestions usually show the town and often the postcode, while Enter leaves the choice to the app's ranking, which depends partly on where you are.
3. Search for the terminal, car park, station entrance or gate you need, or use the venue's published navigation address.
4. Drop a pin. In Google Maps, touch and hold an unlabelled part of the map. In Apple Maps, touch and hold until a pin appears, then tap Move to adjust it.
5. Share the pin or its coordinates so nobody has to search again. Google Maps accepts coordinates in its search box: latitude first, with a full stop as the decimal mark, not the decimal comma used in German, Slovak, Czech and Hungarian.
6. Before you start, zoom in on the destination in the route preview and check that it's on the right side of the building and in the town you meant.

To see how far apart the apps are on your trip, compare them side by side on Mapssy and check each destination pin before you set off.