Google stops filling in your hotel rate on September 30
Google is retiring the feature that showed hotel rates without a feed. Your ad disappears, and no free "official site" link takes its place — just the OTA rates and links under your name.
by Markus Busch
What happened. Until now, a hotel could advertise on Google's hotel results without sending Google any prices. Google went and found the rate itself. That arrangement, called third-party rates for hotel ads, is being retired: after September 30, 2026, campaigns running on it stop serving anywhere travelers compare hotel prices.
Who this hits. Hotels advertising without a Hotel Center account of their own. Hotel Center is where a property, or the company acting for it, sends Google its rates and availability. If your booking engine or channel manager already does that, nothing changes for you. If you're running Performance Max for Travel Goals, those campaigns keep going on Search, Display and YouTube; they only lose the hotel results.
What it doesn't mean. Your hotel doesn't disappear from Google. Search it and you'll still get the listing, with a box of prices underneath — Booking.com, Expedia, whoever else sells your rooms. The traveler sees a full page. She just doesn't see the row with your own name on it, the one that would have sent her to your booking page instead of an OTA's.
What fixing it takes. A price feed into Google, set up through a Hotel Center account or sent by your booking engine or channel manager, connected to your Google Ads account. Then new campaigns, because the old ones can't be moved across. Weeks of work, not an afternoon.
The part that stays after you've fixed it. Google grades how closely your feed matches your booking page, and calls it your price accuracy score. It reads the prices on your own site and compares them with the prices you sent. It also checks what a traveler sees after she clicks through to the final booking page. Some of that is automated, some done by hand.
The standard is exact. Your total has to be prominently displayed, match what Google showed her, cover an overnight stay, and include every mandatory tax and fee without her clicking anything to find them.
A score below "Excellent" can cost you position in the auction and raise your cost per click. Prices Google reads as wrong get pulled from display and reinstated once fixed. So a resort fee that appears one screen later than Google expects becomes a media cost.
What to do this month. Open Google Ads and look through your linked accounts for a Hotel Center account. If one is there, your prices are already coming from you and none of this touches you. If there isn't one and you're running hotel ads, Google has been supplying your rate, and you have until September 30 to replace it.
Either way, look at the score. It applies to every hotel with a feed, including the ones this change doesn't touch. If the Hotel Center account is your own, the score sits in the left menu under Pricing, Accuracy tab: the current one, a predicted one based on recent feed trends, the reasons prices mismatched, and the last itineraries Google tested.
If the account isn't yours, find out whose it is. Most independents reach Google through their booking engine or channel manager, and the account belongs to them — so the score sits on someone else's screen while it affects what your ads cost. Ask them for the number, and for the prices Google flagged.
Every row in that box bills you a commission when the guest books. The row pointing at your own booking page doesn't. After September 30 it's there because you sent Google the price, and it stays only while the price still matches.
Read also: The OTA is not your competitor on Google · The OTA is not your competitor on Google
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