When coordinates beat an address
A postal address is a lookup, and lookups fail. Field gates, festival entrances, trailheads, building-site access roads, remote holiday lets, the loading bay behind a shop — all places where the address takes people to roughly the wrong spot, or to no spot at all.
A geo: code carries latitude and longitude directly, so the map opens on the exact point rather than a best guess. It is the difference between "the venue" and "the gate you can actually drive through".
Finding your coordinates
In Google Maps, right-click the exact point and the first menu item is the coordinate pair, ready to copy. On a phone, drop a pin and read them from the place card. Paste them as decimal degrees — 41.3874, not 41°23'14"N. Latitude runs -90 to 90 and longitude -180 to 180; anything outside is refused rather than encoded into a code that leads nowhere. Four or five decimals puts you within a few metres.
The honest compatibility warning
Android handles geo: links well: scanning opens the default map app on the point. iPhones are inconsistent — depending on the iOS version and scanning app, the link may open a map or just show you the raw text.
So test with an iPhone before printing anything that matters. If it misbehaves, use the link type with a normal maps URL instead: a denser code that opens reliably everywhere, at the cost of depending on that map provider.
What goes inside the code
The whole payload is the coordinate pair:
geo:41.3874,2.1686- latitude first, then longitude, separated by a comma
- decimal degrees only, negative for south and west
- no map provider is named, so the phone uses whichever map app it prefers
Before you print it
- Scan it with an iPhone and an Android. This is the one type where the two genuinely differ.
- Four or five decimal places is plenty. More digits only make the code denser.
- Print the address underneath as a fallback for anyone whose phone shows raw text.
- For an entrance or a gate, pin the point people should drive to, not the middle of the building.