Product Announcement
As guidelines and best practices around COVID-19 rapidly evolve, we’ve modified the Reserve with Google booking experience for users globally. Users will get the following disclaimer during checkout:
Verify info before booking
Hours or services may differ due to COVID-19. Contact the place before booking or visiting for the latest info.
This is a temporary addition to the booking flow for all businesses (both essential and non-essential). We will evaluate the message as guidance around COVID-19 evolves.
Guidelines
As COVID-19 makes its way across the globe, it’s affecting our communities in different ways. Through this crisis, we want to ensure that users continue to have an excellent and consistent experience on Reserve with Google. Towards that goal, please see the below list of guidelines for how we ask you to interact with Reserve with Google users in this uncertain time:
Please ensure that businesses are updating their hours and closure accurately on Google Maps and that this is reflected in your Feeds and Real-time API Updates.
- If a business changes their hours or closes, please ensure that your availability feed reflects the most up-to-date status for that business. For businesses affected by COVID-19, please ask them to update their listing on Google Maps. Please ensure that any bookings that cannot be honored are canceled and/or refunded, and that any changes are communicated directly with the user.
If you remove a merchant from your feed to Reserve with Google due to closure, please ensure that any existing bookings with that merchant are canceled/refunded for all users.
- Please ensure that any future dated bookings that cannot be honored are canceled and/or refunded, and that any changes are communicated directly with the user.
Please be sensitive with your cancelation and refund policies.
- We encourage you to evaluate your cancelation and refunds policies in the light of users’ uncertainty. If there are any changes to these policies , please communicate these directly to the user.
If your support operation is impacted due to COVID-19, please inform both Google and users what channels they should utilize instead.
- If your support operations are impacted due to COVID-19, please update users directly to let them know how to get support for their bookings.
With any questions, we encourage you to refer to this developer site and Partner Portal for any updates and as always feel free to reach out to support.