About hotel free booking links

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With free booking links, your booking site can appear across Google when users search for hotels. You can connect with more travelers and drive more bookings at no cost.

Free booking links display your site name or hotel name along with the room rate for the itinerary selected, allowing you to show the best rate to travelers. When users click on your link, they’ll be taken directly to the landing page you provide. Learn more about What makes up a hotel booking link

How to get started

Existing partners

If you’re an existing Hotel Center partner and you’re participating in Hotel Ads, you’re automatically eligible to show free booking links. Any property with a bid in a hotel campaign, available rates, and a landing page will be eligible. There’s no cost for clicks on free booking links. Bids have no impact on the ranking of free booking links. Your hotel ads will continue using the set bid price.

New hotels and booking partners

Hotels and hotel booking partners who don’t have a Hotel Center account but are interested in getting started with free booking links should visit our starter guide. If you’re a hotel owner that uses a reservation system, you may already be connected to Google through your provider. Check with them, and they can set up your booking links for you.

Ranking

Hotel free booking links use a variety of signals to determine which links are best to show users. These signals include consumer preference, value offered to the user, landing page experience, and historical accuracy of the prices provided to Google as measured in our Price Accuracy Policy. Google’s commercial relationship with the free booking link provider has no effect on ranking, nor can anyone pay for a higher ranking. Neither participation nor non-participation in Hotel Ads impacts ranking of free booking links. Learn how to optimize your free booking links with our best practices

Reporting and click tracking

You can view your free booking link performance data in your Hotel Center account in the "Reports" section. Learn more About performance reports for free booking links

If you want to track clicks using a third-party web analytics tool, you can add a dynamic landing page variable that lets you know when a click came from an ad or a free booking link. Learn more About tracking for free booking links

FAQs

1. How are free booking links different from existing hotel ads?

Our free booking links display similar information to our paid booking links, but the main difference is that hotel ads are paid links, ranked according to Google’s ad auction, whereas free booking links are unpaid links, ranked according to their utility to users. Google may show free booking links alongside hotel ads within the existing booking module. Hotel partners pay no fee for free booking links, and Google doesn’t collect any payment for placement or user engagement with these links.

2. Why are my paid ads showing below free listings?

We continuously evaluate how to best enhance the user and partner experience within Google’s travel products, including how users interact with both paid and free content. This includes testing placement variations of free booking links relative to paid booking links.

3. Can a partner appear in both paid and free booking links for a single impression?

Yes. Because ranking of free booking links is completely separate from ad ranking, duplication is possible. This is just as with text ads and search results.

4. If I don’t have a Hotel Center account, how do I opt-out of free booking links?

Hotel owners without a Hotel Center account can either:

  • Contact your integration partner and ask to opt out your property.
  • Stop sending your price for that hotel to the integration partner. This will also stop hotel ads from serving for that property.

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