October 2019 Announcements

2019-10-08

Localized Texts

All End-to-end integrations

Reserve with Google now supports localization so users may view content based on their browser language settings.

Impact: By serving users localized texts (e.g. service name/description), users can better understand the contents of the service and make an informed booking.

How to implement:

3DS1/3DS2

All End-to-end integrations with payments that need to comply with PSD2

Reserve with Google provides an implementation for 3DS1/3DS2 to support the Strong Customer Authentication requirement for PSD2.

Impact: If you have inventory that must comply with the PSD2 mandate, you must implement support for 3DS1 or 3DS2.

How to implement:

Custom Intake Forms

Things-to-do

Custom intake forms can now be applied for a given merchant and service, so that users can enter critical pieces of information relevant to the booking.

Impact: If your merchant and service requires additional fields to be captured (e.g. age, dietary restrictions), please use the custom intake form to ensure the correct details are captured at the time of booking.

How to implement:

Hotel Pick-up & Service Level Locations

Things-to-do

Service level locations are used to specify start locations, end locations, and multiple points of interests for your tours and activities.

Impact: Service level locations will inform Reserve with Google on what are the relevant locations that are associated with a particular service, which then can be surfaced to the user in a meaningful manner. Additionally, this feature unlocks the ability for users to specify hotel pick-up and drop-off locations.

How to implement:

Booking Options

Things-to-do

Inventory that has booking options (e.g. $3 add-on for the audio guide in a museum tour) is now supported.

Impact: This allows different ticket options to be presented to the user.

How to implement:

  • Add localized_option_description under TicketType in the Services feed

Cancellation Policy

Things-to-do

Cancellation policy (required) is now a separate structured field in the Services feed.

Impact: Cancellation policy as a structured field instead of embedded in the service description allows Reserve with Google to surface cancellation policy in a more clear manner and helps to flag missing cancellation policies more easily.

How to implement:

Asynchronous bookings

Beauty & Dining

Asynchronous inventory (e.g. merchant manual confirmation bookings) is now supported. Please reach out to your Google contact before proceeding.

Impact: This feature unblocks inventory that requires merchant manual confirmation (e.g. a restaurant that manually confirms or denies reservation requests).

How to implement:

Things-to-do Policy

Things-to-do

All partners in the Things-To-Do vertical should comply with the new policy that outlines which inventory can be included and what locations can be tagged.

Impact: Failure to comply with the policy will result in take-down.

Read through:

Starter Integration Place Actions Policy

Starter integrations

All starter integrations should comply with new policy that outlines which types of place action links can be added to integration.

Impact: Failure to comply with the policy will result in take-down.

Read through:

Other Product Announcements

Guest Check-out

Beauty & Dining (without payments) & Waitlists

Users can now create bookings as a guest and do not need to sign-in to a Google account.

Impact: The intent of this feature is to enable more bookings by removing the additional step to sign-in to a Google account.

Partner Portal Announcements

Features

Partners can now edit select integration configuration (e.g. toggle availability checker, add partner support url, or edit maximum dining party size).

Impact: Partners can now self-serve and manage select settings without a dependency with the Reserve with Google team.

Availability Checker

Before launching, partners should run the availability checker tool in production to ensure slots are not stale and booking server availability related calls are not failing.

Impact: The availability checker can help catch issues related to staleness for services, and is now a required test before launch.

Contact Information

Before launching, partners are now required to fill out the Contact Information page in the Partner Portal to provide us the correct escalation channels. If you have already launched, please log-in to the Partner Portal and verify the information is accurate.

Impact: Contact information allows the Reserve with Google team to escalate issues via the appropriate partner channels.

Improved Merchant Matching

An improved merchant matching process via the Partner Portal has been rolled out where more matching options will be shown to the partner.

Impact: Through showing more options, partners are more likely to find and match the appropriate location to the merchant.