Before beginning direct integration with Google, you should consider the following criteria to determine what to expect in the onboarding experience on the platform.
There are 2 ways you can connect your rate inventory with Google:
- Direct integration - Using the Google API. See the Hotel Prices Documentation Overview for more technical details.
- 3rd party integration - For partners already working with a 3rd party integration partner, we recommend working directly with the partner to connect to Google if you anticipate that you may require dedicated technical resources for any of the steps below. See our list of integration partners
You can display your hotel availability and rates on Google Search, Maps, and other platforms, allowing your hotels to be prominently shown to the millions of travelers searching for hotel accommodations on Google every day.
By integrating your hotel availability and rates, you can promote your inventory with hotel booking links, allowing you to:
- Attract lookers and bookers by engaging customers who are already browsing hotel photos and reviews or searching hotels in your city.
- Connect with new and returning customers and send them to your site to book directly.
Note: If you’ve signed licensing contracts with Google but your Hotel Center account hasn’t been created, send an email to your account manager with the email addresses of the account owners. After your account is created, owners can add more users to the account with owner, editor, or viewer access. Once you’ve successfully onboarded to Hotel Center, your listings are eligible to show as free booking links and you will be automatically opted in to the feature.
1. Set up your hotel list
The hotel list contains all the properties that a partner wishes to show on Google. This feed contains the physical attributes of the property—such as name, address, GeoCode locations, phone numbers and website URLs (optional). Google matches properties in your hotel list to businesses on Google Maps. If your property has missing or incorrect information, it may not be matched. The schema and listing requirements to successfully validate properties can be found here [XML, CSV].
Partners can provide a hotel list using one of two methods:
- Partners can provide their list of property information by manually uploading a CSV or XML file via the Hotel Center platform.
Note: We recommend using this mode for fewer than 10,000 properties or a hotel list in one language.
- Partners can host their property list on a HTTP, HTTPS, or FTP server. Once partners provide the URL and authentication, Google will automatically fetch and ingest the latest file available at a regular cadence (typically once a week).
We recommend that partners keep the hotel list on Google in sync with their systems, especially for closed hotels and upcoming hotel openings. Partners are required to provide accurate and up-to-date information regarding the status of their hotels. They must ensure that information matches between the feed and the website at all times.
2. Determine how you'll update your hotel prices
You can choose from various price feed delivery modes for sending hotel pricing updates to Google. When considering technical capabilities, partners are encouraged to consider the following aspects for pricing and utilizing one of two methods:
- Set up a server to connect with Google and determine the best delivery mode. Once we're confident in our ability to connect with your service and can confirm the files are properly structured, we can increase the bandwidth to align production levels.
- Send Google an ARI (availability, rates, and inventory) feed that contains nightly rates with limits on stays, arrival, departure, etc. Contact us if you are interested in using this option.
Rich pricing data is important for users to see and recognize partners on Google. We strongly recommend you use all of these features below to improve your performance on Google:
- Set up a pricing system for your inventory that supports prices for itineraries up to the next year and supports lengths of stay up to 30 nights. By providing more coverage, you'll be eligible for more opportunities to show your rates and availability. Google will only query the itineraries that users are searching for within that window.
- Respond to live pricing when a user is waiting for a price on Google within 1 second.
- Provide pricing for up to 6 occupants (1-6 adults, 0-5 children) To show users room rates for different packages, rooms, or occupancies within a specific property, you can use room bundles.
- If relevant to your business, you can use conditional rates to vary your pricing for users of different countries, devices, or other categories.
- To show users on Google your unique membership rates, you can use private rates. You can also use audience lists (remarketing lists) from your platform.
3. Customize your landing pages
A landing page is a unique URL that redirects users from Google to a partner's website after they click on a hotel’s price on Google or Google Maps. Partners are expected to provide at least one landing page URL in their landing page feed. You can define how Google constructs the link so that it includes additional information about the user and their itinerary. For example, you can include information such as the hotel ID, occupancy, room ID, and check-in dates in the URL.
- Partners can follow the instructions in this Hotel Prices developers guide to construct dynamic landing page URLs and manage and update landing page settings directly in Hotel Center.
- Landing pages should load in a reasonable time and appear fully functional. A page may be considered non-functional if content (such as images and descriptions), prices, or links fail to load. A page load time of 3 seconds or less is recommended for best user experience and optimizing conversion. Google will consider a page to be non-functional if a user is unable to interact with the page for more than 10 seconds. Learn more about our referral experience policy
4. Maintain an excellent Price Accuracy score
Price Accuracy represents a data quality requirement to participate in ads and free booking links, and is a reflection of how complete and accurate your pricing is in your price feed relative to the prices shown on your own website. With this, Google expects partners to comply with the defined Price Accuracy Policy at all times.
Partners must represent prices to the user in a complete and transparent manner. Prices sent to Google must match prices the user sees on the final booking page and should be itemized by base room rate, taxes, and other fees. Google is stringent on checking that prices shown in hotel booking links match the prices provided on your website as it ensures a good end-to-end experience for users engaging with your prices on Google. Read more about our Price Accuracy policy requirements
5. (Optional) Use Google APIs
Partners can also use our Travel Partner API to view pricing, hotel, and diagnostic reporting data about your Hotel Center account. Learn more about our Feeds API capabilities
Note: You will need to use OAuth 2.0 to authenticate and successfully access any Travel Partner APIs.
6. (Optional) Setup and optimize hotel campaigns on Google Ads
Once you complete data feeds integration in Hotel Center, you can use hotel campaigns in Google Ads to dynamically bid and set specific budgets based on your advertising strategy. Learn more about onboarding in Google Ads through our external help center resources
For campaign management, partners can make use of the Google Ads API. It allows you to create/modify campaigns and view metrics regarding your ad performance.