Place categories vs place tags vs. sub-categories

Having investigated this further, shared parent categories would probably be the best solution. However at the moment only 1 parent category can be selected when creating a sub-category, which is in line with the problem description above.

I dont think tags would be actually the right solution. Is there a way to have shared parent categories? Or am I not thinking this through from the right perspective?

Got it, thanks for clarfiying Guust.

Would you have any idea how to solve the problem of shared parent categories, i.e. sub-catogories of Italian, American, German restaurants that can all have the same major parent categories of budget, medium, or premium?

I would think this to be highly practical and must have come up before.

That’s clear, thanks Guust!

Approach 1
I’m fine to duplicate all same subcategories for each category, however, if done so, how would this affect the advanced search? Because from a practical user point of view, I want the front-end to have one selection option for the subcategory (e.g. Italian), which technically would be 3 subcategories Budget:Italian, Medium:Italian, and Premium:Italian. How would this be best done?

Approach 2
Alternatively, I thought of having the categories (Budget, Medium, Premium) as a custom field and the subcategories (Italian, Americna, German) as categories because I understand that the advanced search allows to search for custom fields. I havent bought the advanced search yet, so I’m not sure if this would work, because the custom field “Restaurant Type” would have different values (Italien, American, German) and this approach would only work if the advanced search would actually search for the value. In essence, the user would select the categories Budget and Medium and additionally select the custom fields Italin and American.

Which approach do you think would be better?

Thank you very much for your help!

Thank you Guust.

Looking at the last link you posted, I wonder if we are overseeing something. In the example there, they filter for “dogs”:

7. Now if your vilsitors click the search button in the example above, the results will return:
a) Listings from the Places CPT only,
b) that are in the Attractions category, and
c) have farm in the title, description, category or tag of the listing, and
d) are around the center of Amsterdam (depending on the radius set in the system), and
e) will be filtered to only return those listings that have dogs.

The example doesnt provide enough details of where the value (“dog”) was entered but from the example I understand they created a custom field “Animals on the farm” and assigned somehow a value “dog” that was searchable with a checkbox.

Translating this to our example, wouldn’t it be then possible to have the “restaurant category” (=”Animals on the farm”) as custom field and then assign values of “budget”/”medium”/”premium” (= “dogs”, “cats”, “mice” “rats”) that can be clicked with a checkbox in the advanced search bar?

The worst case would be the value “dog” wasnt assigned in the custom field and the search with the checkbox “dog” just scans through titles, description, tags and categories.

Thanks
David