Price accuracy is a key component of good experiences for our users. Inaccurate prices lead to a poor user experience.
For more information about price accuracy, check the Price Accuracy Policy. For information about how to fix issues, check How to handle price accuracy issues.
Price accuracy overview
Aspects of price accuracy
There are several aspects to take into account for providing accurate prices:
- The base hotel price should match the hotel price advertised on the landing page of your site.
- The taxes and other fees (both collected online and collected at the hotel) provided in your price feed should match what is indicated on the landing page of your site.
- Each price (base price, taxes and fees) sent to Google should also match the corresponding fields on the final booking page on your site. As a result, the total price should match as well.
- The total price should include all the fees paid by the user (including fees not collected online).
Price accuracy tests
We use a combination of ways to ensure the accuracy of prices:
- A machine-learning algorithm interprets prices across time and from other partners who advertise on the same hotel, to arrive at a set of possibly inaccurate prices that we will evaluate.
- We use a crawler to scrape your site. It reads the prices advertised on the site and compares that with the prices that you sent to Google.
- A team also manually validates the prices on your site to ensure the highest levels of confidence in the accuracy tests.
- Google checks prices across country-specific segments to give you greater visibility into areas that might need improvement.
- You can use the price accuracy report to identify problem areas. The trend chart shows your average price accuracy scores over time, and displays up to three country-specific price accuracy scores (if their scores differ significantly from your overall score).
For more information, check How are price accuracy scores calculated?
Keep accuracy levels high
Here are a few best practices to keep price accuracy high:
- Ensure that the prices are frequently updated (several times a day) to reflect the most current prices.
- Make sure that the components of the price, such as taxes and other fees, are also updated frequently.
- Indicate the taxes and other uncollected fees clearly on your site so that our crawlers and manual reviewers can easily find them.
- Look closely at all aspects of the hotel price: the prices of different room bundles, prices on mobile vs desktop, and send us accurate prices in all situations.
- When conducting any tests on your website design and layout, inform your technical account manager so that we can take that into consideration when we test for price accuracy.
- If a specific country shows a high level of mismatched prices, try filtering your price accuracy report by that country using the Hotel country field. This will help you to identify and fix price mismatches.