"Where is it again?"
That question always comes. In the week before your event, on the day itself, by app, by email, through somebody passing it on to somebody else. Usually all you can do is type the address out once more.
Until now the place of your event lived in a single free-text field. "De Nieuwe Kolk theatre", or "De Vlinder community centre, Hoofdstraat 12". Fine to read, but a phone can do very little with it: no directions button, no point on the map, no reminder when you are nearby.
That is why there is now a second field under the name of your venue: Address of the venue. You pick the real address there, and that one address carries through everywhere.
Searching instead of typing
You pick the country first and then simply type what you know: "Hanzelaan 95 Zwolle", "Unter den Linden 5 Berlin". Suggestions appear from two letters onwards.
For the Netherlands those suggestions come from the PDOK location server — the official land registry addresses, the same source the government uses. For the rest of Europe we use Photon, which runs on OpenStreetMap. We query both from our own server: your visitors never get another company's mapping service on their screen, and while you fill in your event nothing quietly travels to Google.
Pick a suggestion and you see a card with the address and the note "Coordinates found — visitors get a directions link". For a Dutch address the province fills itself in as well, if you had not chosen one yet.
Once you pick, you see straight away whether coordinates came with it — and which source the address came from.
Is your spot not there — a field, a marquee, an address that is just slightly off? Click Enter manually and type street and town yourself. No coordinates, but the directions link then works on the address.
What your visitor notices
This is the whole point of the exercise: you enter it once, and after that it is everywhere.
- On the event page the address sits under the date, as a link. One tap and the visitor's map app plots the route.
- In the confirmation email there is a "Venue" line with the address and the same directions link.
- On the ticket (PDF) the address sits under the name of the place, with the link next to it.
- In the calendar invite the address is included both as the location and as coordinates, so the calendar app can navigate and warn in time that you should leave.
- On the wallet pass the directions sit on the back. And because the pass knows the coordinates, it surfaces by itself on the day when the visitor is near the venue. Google shows a small map with the pass. More about those passes in tickets in Apple Wallet and Google Wallet.
- In the widget on your own website the address with its directions link sits in the header.
And at Google
Search engines read structured data from your event page: what the event is, when it is and where. That "where" used to be a piece of text; it is now a real postal address with street, postcode, town and coordinates.
That improves the odds of your event showing up properly with its location for searches that include a place name, and of mapping services and AI assistants picking the right spot instead of guessing.
No map on your page — on purpose
You will not see an embedded map on the event page. That is a choice. A third-party map on your page means scripts, load time and somebody watching along with your visitors. A plain text link with the address does the same job: it opens the map app the visitor already uses, with the route ready to go.
For the same reason the finder degrades quietly when an address source is briefly unreachable: you simply see no suggestions and type the address manually, instead of your form grinding to a halt.
In short
- Location stays the name of the place; Address of the venue is the real address underneath it.
- Dutch addresses come from the land registry (BAG), European ones from OpenStreetMap.
- With an address chosen, visitors get directions everywhere: page, email, ticket, calendar, wallet pass and widget.
- No official address? Enter it manually; the directions link then searches on the address.
Fill it in for your next event — it takes ten seconds and saves you a stream of messages on the day itself.
