Hey there,
I´m an avid user of the maps.me app and have noticed while I travel that many hotels are not where the locator pin is on the map. This is due to people not pinning correctly, I’m guessing.
However, when I want to edit and move the hotel locator pin on OpenStreetMap, the pin for the hotel doesn’t even display. It seems that if the hotel is linked with booking.com it doesn’t appear, whereas hotels that don’t have a booking.com link, do appear.
Why is this?
Many thanks!
That’s because most of the hotels were taken not from OpenStreetMap, but from booking.com. Its database is not perfect geographically — some noticed errors of hundreds of meters — but much bigger than OSM’s. The downside for using the proprietary source is, we cannot fix it. You can try writing to booking.com though.
A common problem with businesses is that they, or their advertising agents, use the postcode to place them on the map. That can easily produce such errors. Hopefully no-one submitting to OSM will do this, especially given the patchy coverage of postcodes on OSM.
Note that the common standard renderings of OSM do not draw pins. They may, however miss out details to avoid overcrowding the map. In this case, it sounds like maps.me is not using OSM data for the hotels.
One of the issues with maps.me is that it forces its users to only use hotels data from external source, and does not offer the option to shows the hotels from OSM. 
My impression is that maps.me conflates/correlates hotels in OSM with those it gets from booking.com. That is, if the hotel is in OSM the location shown on Maps.me will be accurate. If the hotel is not in OSM then the location is very approximate. At least the is what I think I am seeing where I live.
Probably, and there are some people that thinks this is incompatible with the OSM license…
I have seen a post about this issue somewhere in the forum or in a mailing list.
That was what I thought. It is creating a derivative of both OSM and the other data source, and therefore requires both to have compatible licences.
From my own experience I can tell that notifying booking.com of misplaced hotel positions on their maps, they usually fix it within a few days.
Thanks so much for the feedback, guys, it makes sense now. Although, can I be bothered chasing up booking.com now just to rectify the constant location problems with hotels? I’m afraid not.