At home, meeting up after splitting is easy: "I'm on the corner of Market and 5th." Abroad, that sentence often doesn't exist. Either the street names are in a script you can't read, or the city doesn't use them the way you'd expect.
Cities where the address won't help
In Japan, most streets don't have names at all. An address in Tokyo goes from the ward to the district to the block to the building, so a place might be Asakusa 4-5-10, and none of those numbers is a street. Under the system most cities use, set up by a 1962 law, buildings are numbered by where their entrance sits around the edge of the block. People in Japan give directions by stations, crossings and landmarks, and so does every visitor who's tried to find a restaurant from its address.
Venice has a different problem. Its house numbers were introduced by the Austrians in 1801 and run through each of the six districts, not along each street. In Castello, the numbers wind from one end of the district to the other, and the highest number in the city is 6828. "Castello 5250" tells you which district you need. It doesn't tell you which of the narrow lanes around you leads to it.
Plenty of other places are hard in smaller ways. Even when you can make out a street sign with some effort, it's rarely quick enough to text it to a friend while standing on the corner.
Meet at a dot
The easiest fix is to stop using addresses for meeting up. If everyone in the group shares their live location for the day, nobody has to describe where they are. You find your friend by walking towards their dot, and the map handles the street names.
On a trip, set up a Radar in the morning with an end time that evening. Everyone joins, and then the group can split however it likes: two people to the museum, three to the market, one who wants an hour alone in a café. When it's time to meet for lunch, one person picks somewhere and the others walk to their dot. If the person waiting moves to a table inside, the dot moves with them.
If there's a fixed place you'll all come back to, add it as a stop. That might be the hotel, the station you're leaving from or the restaurant you've booked for dinner. Each person can then see their own distance to it, which helps when you're working out whether you have time for one more shop.
Data before you land
All of this needs mobile data, so sort it out before the trip, not at the airport.
- Inside the EU and EEA, an EU phone plan works much as it does at home under the "roam like at home" rules, in force since 2017 and extended to 2032. Check your operator's fair-use limit. The UK is outside it, and UK operators set their own roaming charges.
- Elsewhere, a travel eSIM is usually cheaper than your home operator's roaming. Most recent phones support one alongside your normal SIM. Buy and install it on Wi-Fi before you leave, and turn it on when you land.
- Set up the Radar on Wi-Fi at the hotel, and make sure everyone has joined before you head out, so nobody needs to do it on a slow connection in the street.
If one friend's data does stop working, the rest of the group can't see them move, so agree on a time and a fixed place to fall back on while you're all still together. A big landmark everyone can find without directions, like the main station or the cathedral, works better than the café you passed on the way in.