Pricing strategy for Hotel ads

Traditionally, properties have rates defined in the local currency that are available to all global users. These rates are known as public rates.

At Google, if no restrictions are applied (through conditional rates or private rates), we think that public rates are accessible and bookable by every user. If you want to offer rates targeted at specific users, you should consider using conditional rates or private rates.

Example

If the property has a domestic rate and a rest-of-world rate, you should set a domestic conditional rate and a ROW conditional rate instead of a public rate and an international rate. Otherwise, when the public rate is lower than the international rate, we think the international travellers can book both the public rate and international rate, and serve the public rate to the travellers.

However, if you have a public rate and an international traveller discount, you could set the public rate with a ROW conditional rate for the discount. Google will pick the best possible rate among the available ones.

Since public rates aren't required in your price feed, you can implement a no-public-rate pricing strategy and use conditional rates and private rates to fully define your inventory. You can check out an example of conditional rates with no public rate in our developer guide.

Note: You should only use no-public-rate pricing strategy when it reflects your pricing system and understand that:

The no-public-rate pricing strategy might limit price coverage, as there's likely to be users not covered by conditional or private rates.
The no-public-rate pricing strategy could greatly proliferate the number of rates that need to be transmitted.

In this article, we'll cover the different rates that you can integrate into your ads based on criteria such as user device, country, occupancy, or the user's eligibility for exclusive discounts.

Geo targeting rates

You can only target users at the country level. We don't support rates targeting a lower level, such as state, prefecture, city or lat/long radius.

Domestic and international rates

Domestic rates target users in the country of the property. International rates or ROW rates target users outside the local country of the property.

The differences with country rates lie in the implementation. A domestic rate rule (with <IsDomestic/>) applied to a property is equivalent to a country rate rule targeting the property's local country. You don't need to define one rate rule for each country that your account has properties in.

One-rate-per-country pricing

The one-rate-per-country pricing strategy is applicable when you don't have a rate that's bookable by global users, and instead, you have one rate for each user country.

In this case, you should use conditional rates to restrict those rates to be only bookable by the targeted country. Bear in mind that:

You'll have no public rate, meaning that all rates will be associated with a rate rule targeting a user country.
You'll have one rate rule per country. For example, us_rate, uk_rate and jp_rate
You have to tag your rates with the rate rules.
If a rate is targeting more than one country,
- You can have a rate rule targeting both countries.
- Or you can send two rates, each tagged with a rate rule that's targeting one of the countries.

Promotions for users in certain countries

If you're having a promotion in certain countries, or you're defining your rates by countries, you could use country rates.

If you're using pull pricing or changed pricing, bear in mind that country rates are part of conditional rates at Google. Learn more about conditional rates.

If you're using ARI (availability, rates and inventory), country rates can be defined using Promotions.

Local taxes and VAT

If a property charges different taxes or VAT for tourists compared to local residents, such as the Malaysian Tourism Tax and Israel VAT, it's required that all variations of taxes and VAT scenarios are sent to Google using conditional rates.

Mobile rates/desktop rates

If you're having a promotion for users on mobile or desktop devices, you could use conditional rates to target users on that device type (for ARI, use <Promotions/>), while keeping the public price available to everyone.

If you have a device-targeted pricing strategy, you'll need to use conditional rates to restrict each rate to be only bookable on the device type.

Non-double occupancy rates

Non-double occupancy rates refer to rates for single occupancy or 3+ occupancy. The users can choose the occupancy in the search.

Example scenarios include:

Discounted rates for single occupancy
Child occupancy
Per-person rates

When Google offers these rates to users:

Larger occupancy rates can accommodate smaller occupancy rates. For example, a 4-occupancy rate is considered eligible for a user's search for 3 occupancy.
Adult occupancy can accommodate child occupancy. For example, a 3-adult rate is considered eligible for a user's search for 2 adults and 1 child.

To use this feature, you'll need to update your landing page configuration and price feed.

Landing page

If you're not using child occupancy, you should include (NUM-GUESTS) in your landing page URL. (NUM-GUESTS) accounts for both adults and children.

If you're using child occupancy, you should use (NUM-ADULTS) and (NUM-CHILDREN). You could also use (FOR-EACH-CHILD-AGE) and (CHILD-AGE) to get the ages of each individual child.

Price feed

Pull and changed pricing

In addition to using different rate plans, Pull or Changed pricing partners could use <Rates/> to specify multiple rates for different occupancy scenarios.

Child occupancy is currently only supported in Changed pricing (Live Query with Context). Learn more about child occupancy.

ARI

Partners using ARI can send multiple <BaseByGuestAmount/> each for a different number of guests.

If you're using per-occupancy flat rates or can accommodate extra occupancy with extra charges, note that:

If the rates vary by date, you could consider using <AdditionalGuestCharges/> to send it along with one <BaseByGuestAmount/> for minimum occupancy.
If the rates are more static by properties, you could use <ExtraGuestCharges/>.
Rates with occupancy greater than the <Capacity/> of the <RoomData/> will be discarded.

Child futon and meals for Japan

The selection of child futon and/or meals is currently not supported due to UI limitations. Despite this, it is recommended to always include charges for child futon and/or meals in your total price because Google requires all potential fees or charges to be available to users even if they end up not paying.

Loyalty member rates

If you have discounts for your loyalty programme members, you can use private rates.

To communicate your discount to all users, whether they're members of your loyalty programme or not, you can use Member rates visible and Member rates hidden. Google requires these loyalty rates to be made available to all users, which would mean that it's free to join your loyalty programme.

If you want to target only members that are eligible for your loyalty programme, you can implement audience list rates. This would require setting up an audience list in Google Ads that would represent members of your loyalty programme, and the rates would only be offered to members.

Unsupported rates

Google requires all rates made available to users to be bookable by them as well. Therefore, we're not able to support certain rates that users can't filter out yet and those that we can't verify whether users can get or not.

Below are some examples of unsupported rates:

Day-use rates: Guests can only stay during the daytime. For instance, 9.00 a.m. to 5.00 p.m.
Short-stay rates: Instead of staying overnight, guests stay for a short period of time, for example, 4 hours. The minimum length of stay is 10 hours.
Gender-specific rates: Only certain genders can book the rates.
Local resident rates: Rates that require proof of local residency at check-in, at a level below country (for example, city, state and prefecture).
Senior rates: Rates that have requirements on users' age, for example, 60 years or over.
Student rates: Rates that are only bookable by students.

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