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To offer a superior user experience and to protect user trust, we’ve documented the criteria for OTA partners (online travel agencies) to participate in Google Flights. Review the details below. If you currently meet the criteria to participate in Google Flights (or you’ll work towards compliance in the next 1-2 months), follow the instructions in the Contact section.
Qualify to participate in Google Flights
Business requirements
To participate in Google Flights, partners must:
- Have a stable and recognized brand, and a history of successful airline ticket purchases.
- Sell airline tickets and take responsibility for post-purchase customer service.
- Serve users a landing webpage containing the itinerary details and the final price.
- Not show one price to the user, then book their itinerary at another.
- Make all upsells opt-in, and not add automatic upsells or additional fees like flight insurance.
- Disclose all payment charges, convenience fees, credit card fees, etc. in the data they share with Google.
- Not change the price of an itinerary at any point during the checkout flow unless the user intentionally adds on a cost, and make the itinerary available for purchase with major credit and debit cards without any additional fees.
- Finalize transactions within 24 hours of sending the first booking confirmation to the user and keep the rate of rejected transactions at <1%.
- Accept major, globally valid payment modes like Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and local credit or debit cards.
- Offer a localized digital experience in the countries they want to serve. This includes:
- Localized languages, currencies, and domains
- Local customer service telephone numbers with local language fluency to support users in that country
- A local point of sale (POS)
Technical requirements
To participate in Google Flights, partners must:
- Implement a deep link with a price to the itinerary, so users don’t have to select it twice.
-
Show users the freshest possible price for the selected itinerary on their landing page (i.e. implement a live pricing check on their landing page).
- Allow Google to monitor price accuracy on an ongoing basis with crawlers. Google’s crawlers will sample up to 5,000 itineraries per day.
- Have high data quality, as measured in terms of their link success rate and price accuracy, like how often the price displayed in Google Flights matches the price on the partner's website. The partner must maintain:
- Link error rate of less than or equal to 5%.
- Price error rate of less than or equal to 10%.
- Have the technical capability to integrate with one of the offered integration methods.
- Define a turnaround time to investigate issues that Google reports.
In addition to the Business and Technical requirements above, the partner must provide Google with a technical point of contact who can lead the integration.
Integrate with Google Flights
Price through Google
Google recommends the following integration path to participate in Google Flights. Under this option, partners can share:
- The rules behind the fees and discounts for GDS carriers, along with their pseudo city codes (PCCs) and Amadeus office IDs
- The fees or discounts atop the airline website prices for LCCs
With the above information, Google Flights will compute the prices and show them to users, and then send users to the partner’s site via a deep link for a specific itinerary.
Cached price feed
Under this approach, partners share a feed containing flights and their prices with Google. Partners must update this feed regularly.
While Price through Google is the preferred approach, Google understands that partners might need to use the cached price feed to support custom content like virtual interlines and private fares.
Live API
With a Live API integration, Google Flights Search queries your API to fetch available flights, prices, and the deep link. For this integration method we require the implementation of a Price Accuracy Tag to report flight prices. This allows for faster accuracy validations and subsequent data quality improvements.
Please find instructions on the addition of the Price Accuracy Tag for Google Tag Manager here and for the global site tag here.
Ongoing monitoring
The criteria to participate in Google Flights helps to provide a better user experience and protect user trust. Google will monitor and/or audit a partner’s compliance with these requirements on a regular basis. To enforce our policies, Google uses both automated and manual checks.
If monitoring and/or auditing discloses noncompliance, appropriate immediate corrective action measures will be implemented, up to and including suspension from Google Flights as described below.
Partner display names
Partner display names must be exempted from click-bait, emojis, or other terms that misrepresent your business to users. If your display name is misleading or is deemed inappropriate or offensive, then Google may, at its discretion, show your website URL instead of your display name in the booking module / next to your link.
Payment / credit card fees charged by partners
This applies if partners charge customers any payment / credit card / convenience / ticketing fee that is added in the Payment step on the partner website / app: for users coming from Google Flights, such fees should be included in the partner's fare calculation in their feed / API response. Google Flights will show users prices inclusive of such fees on the Booking provider page. Partners should include such fees in the price they show to users on their landing page. This eliminates any possible confusion in the users' minds due to price changes, and helps improve conversion rates for partners.
Suspension from Google Flights
Google may, at its sole discretion, decide to suspend a partner’s content (partially or completely) from Google Flights for any of the following reasons:
- Low quality of links
- Low price accuracy
- Failure to meet Google’s participation criteria as outlined above
- Evidence of a poor, deceptive, or harmful experience based on user feedback (via either Google’s own channels or public ones) or otherwise
- Failure to implement priced deep links through one of the above approaches by the communicated deadline
- Provision of content that does not comply with applicable law or regulation
- Other conduct or data issues that frustrate the purposes of Google Flights or its ability to operate in a reasonable manner
In such cases, Google will notify the partner via email, give them a chance to rectify the situation, then, if they fail to do so, suspend them from Google Flights temporarily or permanently. If a partner disagrees with the decision, they may provide additional information to support their case and request a review. Once a partner is suspended, they can re-engage with Google Flights for re-approval when they’re confident that they meet the participation criteria.
Google may, at its sole discretion, terminate a partner’s participation in Google Flights. Where required by law, Google will provide 30 days notice prior to termination, except where immediate termination is permitted, such as in the event of repeated policy violations.
Appeal a decision
If you disagree with a suspension decision, you have the right to appeal. An appeal form will be provided within the suspension notification email. Your request will be reviewed promptly and Google will get back with a decision. Before filing an appeal, make sure you understand the policy and provide as much detail as possible to support the request. We want to provide a safe and trustworthy ecosystem for partners and users, and we may need more information.
You only have one chance to appeal each decision. If your appeal is unsuccessful, you may be required to fix the issue based on our policies and requirements in order for your content to appear.
Please do not submit appeals without providing a rationale. Google reserves the right to suspend your ability to appeal if you repeatedly submit unfounded appeals.
Requirements for expanding to additional countries
The partner and Google may mutually agree to limit initial participation in Google Flights to a few countries in order to meet the participation criteria. If a partner wants to expand to another country, and they meet the criteria to participate in that country, Google, at its sole discretion, will work with the partner to validate and launch.
Contact
Please review all of the above details. If you currently meet the participation criteria for Google Flights (or you’ll work towards compliance in the next 1-2 months), please contact your Google Sales Account Manager for more information.
If you are an existing partner and have a question or complaint, please reach out to us by completing this form.
If you are a business user based in the EU or the UK, you may apply to resolve a dispute under your agreement with Google Flights with mediation, find more details about the mediators we're willing to engage with and instructions about how to request mediation here. Except as required by applicable law, mediation is voluntary and neither you nor Google are obliged to settle disputes through mediation.
FAQs
Why can’t you query my API to get or generate a tokenized deep link?
If Google gets your prices via your Live API, you can provide the deep link along with the prices in the response. Google Flights won’t query another API to generate tokenized deep links.
I provided a deep link that takes users to the O&D search result page, but Google rejected it. Why?
Google Flights requires partners to provide a deep link to their checkout flow which displays the user’s selected itinerary and flight number. This requirement helps improve the user experience and increase the likelihood that users will complete their transactions. If the user landed on the O&D search result page, they would need to go through multiple listings to find the flight they had already picked, potentially resulting in higher abandonment rates.
How does Google Flights rank booking links?
The Google Flights link-ranking algorithm takes into account a few factors with different weights, like:
- Whether the link has a price.
- The price offered by the partner on Google Flights.
- Whether the link is an airline or an OTA link.
- Google’s data shows that users prefer airline links, but Google aims to provide both airline and OTA options among the top results.
- Link type and quality, with a consideration for shallow versus deep links.
- The user should not have to select the itinerary again on the partner’s website.
- Whether the link that’s integrated on Google Flights leads to a mobile-friendly website.
Keep these factors in mind about link ranking:
- The link-ranking algorithm is dynamic and constantly evolving. It adapts to factors like user preferences, so the rank of an individual link may change.
- Big price differences matter more than small differences.
- Ties in price are resolved randomly. However, ranks remain consistent in the same user session, so options don't jump around when a user refreshes the page.