Ask HN: How do travel-based startups cope with the expensive Google services?

It seems the Google geo APIs (Places, Maps) have become unrealistic and unusable.

Suppose you have a travel planning tool, like wanderlog, and you need to display the details for all the places in your plan. Fetching the place details for all those items, multiplied by the number users, multiplied by the times an average user views/edits his plan, means that on a relatively medium or even small scale - the startup will go bankrupt.

Now, suppose you have the money to pay : Since Google's Place Details API does not support Bulk fetching, you need to fetch the details for all the places in your plan separately. The only performance-viable solution would mean to spawn multiple async tasks to fetch those details in parallel. However, very soon you would reach rate limit.

What about caching? : The current caching terms of use, unlike some years ago, allow you to cache only Lat+Long and place id. (not even the title!)

So, either companies like wanderlog/tripit/etc. simply cache all the details (which is illegal), or there is another solution that I'm missing here.

Would love to hear your experiences or simply opinions on the matter.