Google stopped filling in hotel rates on September 30. Here is what your card looks like now.
We checked 17 independent hotels' Google Maps cards in five European cities. On six, the hotel's own price was gone, and resellers from Booking.com to Evendo filled the space under its name.
by Markus Busch
Hotel Wellenberg in Zurich, on the morning of October 9. Open its card on Google Maps and the prices come from Booking.com, trivago, Agoda and EaseMyTrip. The cheapest is EaseMyTrip's, at CHF 215. The hotel's own website is on the card too, as a link under the address. It carries no price.
What we wrote in August. On August 10 we reported that Google would retire the feature that found a hotel's rates by itself, without a price feed from the hotel. From September 30, a hotel without its own Hotel Center connection would stay on Google, but its own row would disappear, and the listing would show only OTA prices.
6 of 17 cards without the hotel's price. Nine days after the deadline, we opened the Maps cards of 17 independent hotels in Zurich, Bern, Vienna, Munich and Lisbon, from a desktop browser in Zurich, logged out. On six, the hotel had no price of its own. Kindli and Wellenberg in Zurich. Nossek in Vienna. Uhland in Munich. Casa do Príncipe and Lis Baixa in Lisbon. At Lis Baixa, the only two sellers left on the card were Evendo and Wego.
Google prints the lowest of them. Its help pages say the price shown for a property is "the lowest price provided across all partners." On these six cards, every partner is someone else. Under that rule, the price Google shows next to the hotel's name is always a reseller's. At Nossek the cheapest seller was trivago DEALS, at CHF 279. Booking.com, in the sponsored block above it, asked 491 for the same dates.
The hotels that kept their row. Rössli in Zurich showed its own CHF 171, the lowest on its card. Boutique Hotel Kugel in Vienna showed its own CHF 92, and it held the sponsored block, ahead of Booking.com at 118. Keeping the row did not guarantee the top spot. Eleven of the 17 cards gave the sponsored block to an OTA or a metasearch site. But a hotel with no row can't be the cheapest seller of its own rooms on its own card.
The limits. From outside, we can't see whether a given hotel has a price feed. A missing price can also mean the hotel's booking engine had no room for those dates, or a feed Google rejected for accuracy. Google picks the dates for each card, so they differ. We have no snapshot of these cards from before September 30. And this is one morning, one browser.
On Monday. Search your hotel on Google Maps on a desktop. If your own website appears without a price, open Google Ads and look for a linked Hotel Center account. If there is none, ask your booking engine or channel manager to connect a price feed. If you ran hotel ads on Google's own rates, those campaigns can't be moved, so new ones have to be set up. While you're there, check that the Google profile is claimed. Uhland's wasn't.
Read also: Google stops filling in your hotel rate on September 30
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