As the owner of an IT service provider in the British Virgin Islands (BVI), an issue our customers come up against over and over again is that of getting their business listed fully in the ‘Google My Business‘ directory.
The assumption that Google makes (we all know what assumptions make us) is that every physical address has the benefit of postal delivery – while this may be true in the USA & UK, for many countries that isn’t the case as a door-to-door postal service is either just not feasible, cost-effective or practical. While the BVI does have a postal service, it delivers only to PO Boxes and unfortunately you cannot enter PO Boxes and have your business correctly located on Google Maps. Additionally, I have waited for over 6 months for correctly addressed letters to reach my PO Box in the BVI and there’s also a high loss rate for international inbound mail.
I’ve discovered that the BVI is far from alone in this frustration, with users from all over the world venting on various forums and no solution in sight:
http://places.blumenthals.com/threaddc51.html
At present there is no resolution on the horizon and there’s no means of recourse – all of the help options assume you want to resolve the simple stuff and direct you to re-enter address details and so on.
I guess for the time being Google is happy to ignore entire countries for their directory.
