Integration Overview

Before you can use Hotel Prices, you must first perform a series of one-time tasks to set up your environment. After that, you must then perform periodic maintenance tasks to ensure that your data is kept up-to-date.

All submitted properties must adhere to the following Google Hotel Ads listing requirements to be eligible:

• Rooms in which paying guests can stay
• A physical presence and fixed location that is open to the public
• Fixed walls and plumbing
• A staffed front desk open during normal business hours
• A minimum stay requirement of no greater than 7 days

For more details, refer to the Listing requirements.

One-time tasks

This section provides an overview of the one-time tasks that you perform during your initial implementation. For additional guidance, see About Hotel Ads integration.

To set up Hotel Prices, perform the following one-time tasks:

1. Create a Hotel List Feed: Upload an XML or CSV file that lists all hotels for which you will provide pricing information; the Hotel List Feed itself does not contain pricing information.

2. (Strongly recommended) Define room and package metadata: By defining this data ahead of time, your pricing updates do not need to include repetitive data such as descriptions, photo URLs, amenities, and other information about each and every room or package for each and every itinerary.
3. Choose a delivery mode: Decide whether to use the Pull or Pull with Hints delivery mode to share your hotel prices with Google. Discuss configuration options with your Technical Account Manager (TAM), including thread counts and whitelisting endpoints.
4. (Optional) Configure your pricing endpoint: Use the Price Configuration tool to define your hotel itineraries per second, hotels per query, and maximum parallel requests.
5. (Hotel Ads only) Provide billing information: Tell your Technical Account Manager (TAM) how you should be billed when you participate in the ad auctions.
6. Provide additional data: The following table summarizes additional data that you define and share with Google when integrating with Hotel Ads:

   Type of Data	Description	Required?	Method of Delivery
   Price Feed	Define pricing/availability for hotels and packages in your Hotel List Feed.	Required	Via the Hotel Ads Center or Pricing & Inventory (Transaction) XML Reference
   Points of Sale	Use the Point of Sale Editor to define the endpoints to which end-users are sent after selecting a sponsored hotel in the search results. End-users can book rooms on the sites defined in the Points of Sale file.	Required	Point of Sale Editor or POS file
   Fenced Rates	Specify different rates for your itineraries, based on the end-user's device and country, or whether the end-user is logged in to their Google account.	Optional	Pricing & Inventory (Transaction) XML Reference

7. (Optional) Conversion tracking: Set up your conversion tracking snippet to ensure that your reports accurately reflect your conversions. You must also set up conversion tracking if you want to use enhanced CPC bidding (formerly known as automatic bid multipliers).

To test your implementation before going live, work with your TAM.

On-going tasks

The following table summarizes the data feeds and files that you regularly provide to Google after you have completed the one-time tasks and started using Hotel Prices:

Type of Data	Description	Structure	Frequency
"Price Feed"	Update pricing and availability for your hotels, including base rates, fenced rates, and qualified rates for rooms and Room Bundles. The way in which you update price information depends on your delivery mode: Pull: Google requests pricing updates from your server, to which you respond with the updates. Pull with Hints: Similar to Pull, but with an additional step to reduce the amount of traffic. For more information, see Delivery Modes.	<HintRequest>, <Hint>, <Query>, <Transaction>	Very frequently
Hotel List Feed	Update the list of hotels for which you then provide pricing and availability information in your Price Feed. You can upload this feed at any time using the Feed Upload Tool.	<listings>	Occasionally
Hotel List Feed	Fix data issues as they arise.	<listings>	As needed
Room and Package Metadata	Update your room and Room Bundle descriptions. Descriptions likely change very infrequently (as often as the hotel itself changes their room configurations). Room Bundle descriptions typically change more frequently.	<Transaction>	About once/week
Points of Sale	When you update your Price Feed (e.g., with Room Bundles, fenced rates, or new hotels), update the endpoints that users can use to book a room.	POS file or Hotel Ads Center	Occasionally
Price Feed Configuration	Define your hotels per query and hotel itineraries per second.	Price Configuration tool>	Once/day

TIP: You can use the Feed Validation tool to ensure that your Transaction and Hint Request messages conform to their schemas.

After configuring your hotel prices, if you encounter errors, try solving the issues with the tips described in Troubleshooting Feeds.

For additional information about configuring and updating your data feeds, contact us.