The Best European City for McDonald's According to Google Maps Reviews

While building databar.ai, we often find ourselves eating at local fast food joints before quickly getting back to our laptops. Since McDonald's is usually the go-to favorite, we decided to use databar.ai to find the best McDonald's in Europe based on Google Maps reviews.

Find out how you can use Google Maps data to generate leads, get alternative market insights, and write better blog posts: learn more.

Getting the data

We used the Google Maps Places Scraper on databar.ai to quickly gather Google Maps reviews, ratings, and addresses of McDonald's locations in major European cities. To keep the analysis focused, we only visualized the largest cities with the most abundant amount of data. 

The resulting data - after removing unneeded columns and filtering by verified & operational restaurants - includes information on ratings, reviews, longitude/latitude, accessibility & offerings for around 800 McDonald's locations across Europe.

Disclaimer: Data was gathered at the start of November - current ratings & reviews may have changed since then.

Comparing reviews across cities

First let's visualize how many locations we have in each city:

Madrid hosts the largest number of locations across our dataset with all other cities trending between 45 - 55 locations per city. Visualizing this on a map, we can see how each city's McDonald's locations are evenly distributed. Very rarely are locations gathered in a specific area. Zoom into cities on this map to see the precise locations of every McDonald's restaurant in our dataset.

Both the data & visualizations were built with databar.ai - curious how we did it? Schedule a time.

Comparing Ratings Across Cities

Comparing ratings across cities in Europe, we can see that Greece either has really lenient reviewers or hosts the best McDonald's in Europe. Athens locations have a median rating of 4.2, while Thessaloniki has a median rating of 4.3. The lowest rated McDonald's is in Nice with a median rating of 2.9. Paris McDonald's locations don't fare much better with a median rating of 3.3.

If we build a histogram with all locations, we can see that McDonald's overall provides a decent level of service - the vast majority of locations land between a rating of 3.5 - 3.9 with some locations having ratings above 4.0 and a tail of very few locations below a 2.7 rating. Some McDonald's had a rating of below 2 - most of them at railway stations & airports with smaller venues and no seating.

Number of reviews per location

To find out which city loves McDonald's the most, we created another box plot showing how many Google Maps reviews were given per location in every city. For example, locations in Bucharest had a median of 4032 reviews per location, which is more than other cities which trend between 1,000 - 1,600 reviews per location.

Paris hosts the location with the largest number of reviews: a whopping 11,237 reviews for a single location, followed by Madrid's 9,855 and Barcelona's 9,269.

Finally, we tried to understand whether higher ratings correlate with more reviews and created a visualization showing the minimum frontier between reviews vs. ratings. In a nutshell, locations with more reviews tend to have higher ratings, but after a certain level (drawn with the line in the chart below), everything goes.

Conclusion

After running this analysis, we know we should steer clear of any McDonald's restaurants in France and definitely visit the once in Greece. People in Madrid & Barcelona go to McDonald's more than anyone else (or at least leave more reviews that other cities). Most McDonald's locations are fine as long as it's an established place with seating and amenities.

All of the above datasets were queried and visualized via the databar.ai no-code editor.

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