Reservations End-to-End Integration Policies

The following integration policies apply to the Reservations End-to-End integration.

End-to-End Policies

Please read through the following integration eligibility criteria before beginning an integration. Partners must meet the following requirements and policies to be eligible to integrate with the Actions Center's Reservations End-to-End integration.

While the following requirements are necessary components of eligibility for the Actions Center program, meeting the requirements does not guarantee a partner will be eligible to integrate or go live with the Actions Center.

Failure to meet the requirements and policies may result in integration, merchant or services being suspended or removed from the platform.

General Platform Requirements

  1. Partners must collect and handle all merchant and user data, including any personally identifiable information, in a manner compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and any other applicable privacy laws.
  2. Partners must be authorized to make bookings on behalf of their merchants.

  3. Partners must have direct access to merchants' availability/time slots in real time (ie. partners must be able to respond to availability requests from Google in less than 1 second).

    • Special case: We do support reservations that require asynchronous confirmation from the merchant, but the reservation flow must be based on an available time slot. Partners must have real time availability, i.e. through merchant online systems, even if it requires confirmation from the merchant to finalize the reservation.

  4. Partners must have comprehensive inventory for their merchants. Merchants with partial or distressed inventory may not be eligible.

  5. Partners must have 30 days or more of merchants' availability.

  6. Partners must support online cancellation of bookings.

  7. Partners requiring pre-payments must abide by the Actions Center's payment policy, their payment processors must be in the following supported list and accept tokenized payments.

  8. Partners must be able to provide accurate pricing data for the cost of services and abide by the Actions Center's pricing policy.

  9. Partners must be able to meet the Actions Center technical Reservations End-to-End integration requirements.

  10. Partners must abide by the Actions Center's merchant and services eligibility requirements.

  11. Partners must abide by the Actions Center's support and maintenance guidelines.

  12. Partners must maintain acceptable error rates defined in Launch and Monitoring guidelines.

  13. All bookings must be confirmed automatically in real time with the exception of bookings made with an async integration. Bookings made through an async integration must adhere to the Async guideline.

  14. Partners must abide by the Actions Center's vertical or feature specific policies (Offers, Payment, Online services and Dining).

  15. Partner must maintain standard quality content for merchant name, address, services name and description per guideline.

Offers policy

In order for offers to be part of the Reservations End-to-End integration, they must meet our eligibility criteria and our technical requirements.

Offers eligibility criteria

  • An offer must be generally available to all customers.
  • A customer should not need to sign up for a membership program, email list, use a certain credit card, or any other restriction in order to redeem the offer.
  • The offer can not be restricted to certain age groups (student or senior discounts).
  • An offer must be predictably available. For example an offer can be valid from 3pm to 4pm, however an offer requiring you to be one of the first 10 customers is not allowed.
  • An offer must be provided by and honored by the merchant.

Offers that do not meet technical or eligibility requirements

If an offer does not meet our eligibility requirements, it should not be included in the Reservations End-to-End integration.

If an offer does not fit out technical requirements or fit in our data spec, it should be omitted from the Reservations End-to-End integration at this time. Please reach out to your Google contact to let us know and provide feedback on what features or changes you would like to see implemented. When reaching out, please make sure to include the number of offers and the number of merchants this impacts as well as some sample offers.

Food Menu Policy and Requirements

Please read through the following integration eligibility criteria before beginning an integration. Partners must adhere to the food menu policies and meet the following requirements to be eligible to integrate. Please note that Google reserves the right to display menu & dish data in ways that are helpful to users.

Failure to meet the requirements and policies may result in integration, merchants or services being suspended or removed from the platform.

Policy and Requirements

  1. Partners must not send prohibited information (see details) in menu feed such as foul language, prohibited images, personally identifiable information (PII) or user generated content.
  2. Partners should not use the menu feed to share non-menu items such as services (ex: curbside, promotion codes, etc.).
  3. Partners are required to provide all required data in Reservations E2E menu spec or Ordering Redirect menu spec (max file size 2MB). The technical requirements are addressed in the Reservations E2E menu spec or Ordering Redirect menu spec by marking fields as optional/required.
  4. Partners should only provide menu items available for the corresponding restaurant locations.
  5. Partners must send a complete menu for each location. Merchants with incomplete menus may not be eligible for display.
  6. Partners and merchants are required to ensure menus are accurate and should provide updates on a daily basis.
  7. Menu items photos should be well-lit, feature one in-focus menu item, must not include people or other non-food images, and must conform to image spec (see photo guidelines).
  8. Prices should be shown, per menu item, without tips, taxes or fees; unless required by local laws and ordinances. Partners must explicitly provide local currency.
  9. Specialty menus are supported and should be removed when no longer available (ex: prix fixe, seasonal, limited time specials).

Payments Policies

This section specifies the general and feature-specific policies for implementing payment on the Actions Center. To ensure a consistent experience for consumers, merchants, and partners using the Actions Center, inventory requiring payment must adhere to the appropriate guidelines. Failure to adhere to these policies will lead to suspension of your integration.

General

These policies apply to all payments transactions and inventory on Reserve with Google:

  1. No charges should be made to a user that are not explicitly agreed to at checkout, as articulated via our payments configuration process.
    • Payment terms contained within the linked Terms of Service page do not satisfy this requirement.
  2. For in-person services, all payments must occur at the time of booking or in-person only. Solicitation of payment by any other means is strictly prohibited.
  3. The amount charged to a user must be the same amount specified in the terms of the transaction.
  4. The transaction must be displayed and charged in the currency of the location of the merchant (currency is specified via the payments configuration process). No currency conversions may take place.
  5. Payment tokens cannot be used to support charges for other transactions or purposes.
  6. No instrument other than the token created for this transaction and sent to you by Google can be used for these charges.
  7. If the acquiring bank for your transactions is subject to PSD2, you must implement 3DS1 or 3DS2 for those transactions when supported by Actions Center and your payment processor.
  8. If the service requires pre-payments, no show fees, and/or deposits, service cancellation_policy definition is mandatory.
  9. If you are adding payments to your integration now or in the future, you must provide reliable and complete contact information including name, address, phone number, email address, and registry information as may be required by certain regulations.

No Show Fee

The following policies apply to inventory and transactions using the no show fee feature:

  1. No show fees for late cancellations must only be charged if a user cancels after the no-charge cancellation window specified for that booking.
    • If no cancellation window is specified for a booking, the default cancellation window ends at the start of the reservation.
  2. Google must be informed via a real-time update if a user is charged a no show fee.

Deposit

The following policies apply to inventory and transactions using the deposit feature:

  1. Deposits should not be used to pay the full price of a service. Prepayment should be used for this function.
  2. If a user cancels before the end of the no-charge cancellation window specified for that deposit, then:
    • Their deposit must be refunded or not charged.
    • If the booking is cancelled outside of the Actions Center, Google must be informed via a real-time update.

Prepayment

The following policies apply to inventory and transactions using the prepayment feature:

  1. A cancellation policy is defined for all prepayment bookings.
    • If no cancellation policy is specified, then bookings default to non-refundable
  2. If a user cancels in a timeframe eligible for a refund (as defined by the cancellation policy for that booking), then:
    • Their prepayment must be refunded as defined by that cancellation policy.
    • If the booking is cancelled outside of Actions Center, Google must be informed if a refund took place or not via a real-time update.

Credit Card Required

The following policies apply to inventory and transactions using the credit-card-required feature:

  1. No charges should be made to the user for any credit-card-required transactions.