Improve Price Accuracy

Aspects of price accuracy

There are several aspects to take into account for providing accurate prices:

• The base hotel price should match the hotel price advertised on landing page of your site.
• The taxes and other fees (both collected online and collected at the hotel) provided in your price feed should match what is indicated on the landing page of your site.
• Each price (base price, taxes & fees) sent to Google should also match the corresponding fields on the final booking page on your site. As a result, the total price should match as well.
• The total price should include all the fees paid by the user (which includes fees not collected online).

Price accuracy tests

We use a combination of ways to ensure the accuracy of prices:

• A machine learning algorithm interprets prices across time, and from other partners who advertise on the same hotel, to arrive at a set of possibly inaccurate prices which we will evaluate.
• We use a crawler to scrape your site. It reads the prices advertised on the site and compares that with the prices that you sent to Google.
• A team also manually validates the prices on your site to ensure the highest levels of confidence in the accuracy tests.
• Google checks prices across country-specific segments to give you greater visibility into areas that might need improvement.
• You can use the Price Accuracy report to identify problem areas. The trend chart shows your average price accuracy scores over time, and displays up to 3 country-specific price accuracy scores (if their scores differ significantly from your overall score).

For more information, check How are Price Accuracy Scores calculated?

Keep accuracy levels high

Here are a few best practices to keep price accuracy high:

• Ensure that the prices are frequently updated (several times a day) to reflect the most current prices.
• Make sure that the components of the price, such as taxes and other fees, are also updated frequently.
• Indicate the taxes, and other uncollected fees clearly on your site so our crawlers and manual reviewers can easily find them.
• Look closely at all aspects of the hotel price: the prices of different Room Bundles, prices on mobile vs desktop, and send us accurate prices in all situations.
• When conducting any tests on your website design and layout, inform your technical account manager so we can take that into consideration when we test for price accuracy.
• If a specific country shows a high level of mismatched prices, try filtering your Price Accuracy report by that country using the Hotel Country field. This will help you identify and fix price mismatches.