What is Google Vacation rentals?
In 2018, Google redesigned its search experience for mobile and desktop hotels and began including vacation rentals in hotel search results. Later in March 2019, Google added a ‘vacation rental’ filter to facilitate the search for holiday rentals. Google began its own “Vacation rentals” alongwith “Trips,” “Things to do,” “Flights” and “Hotels” in 2020.
Google vacation rentals are available both on mobile devices and on desktops. Travelers can choose their destination, date and results by lowest or highest price ratings. In addition, travellers can limit their searches by providing a facilities philtre and users can browse photos, read reviews and see prices and vacation rental availability.
The user experience is quite the same as in all OTAs and when travellers plan to make a reservation and click on “Book now” or To learn more,” travellers are taken to the partner website for completion of the reservation process and payment.
Benefits of listing your vacation rentals on Google
One of the main advantages of Google distributing your rentals is the global scope of the search engine; millions of potential guests who search on Google every day could view your properties. You would also target a highly qualified target audience who plan, compare or book accommodation.
Another important advantage is that their platform will help you increase your direct reservations without any transaction fees because they do not charge anything to send travellers your way.
How to get your website ready for Google vacation rentals
Have one URL for each rental property. All your properties may appear on the same website, but each will require its own URL. This facilitates Google’s identification as different holiday rentals and helps them appear as such in search results.
Confirm for clean URLs. A clean URL is a Web address that can be read, understood and typed easily by people. Dirty URLs contain question marks and other query parameters, on the other hand. .Search engines generally actively ignore or rank these pages lower This is not only very bad for the SEO on your website, but will also spoil your property’s chances of appearing in vacation rental search results.
Create an optimized and verified Google My Business listing. Although the Google My Business guidelines remain unchanged for the moment (i.e. vacation homes are technically considered to be ineligible businesses), a limited number of listings still surface across specific locations.
Have a website certified by SSL. Since early 2017, Google has been penalising non-secured websites (in other words, those which lacked HTTPS and SSL encryption). Making sure the website has these safety certificates now makes it much easier to view Google search results. With HTTPS on your website, guest information is also secured from hackers or cyber attacks. This makes the booking process for everyone much easier and safer.
Conclusion
With more developed Google Vacation rentals and the desire of Google to develop a one-stop shop experience under Google Trips, managers can diversify their marketing and channel strategy. Firstly, your holiday homes should be linked to a channel manager that lists you on Google vacation rentals. On the other side, you can also build a website for booking directly. In this way, you have a comprehensive marketing plan and canals for your holiday rentals, allowing you to easily scale up your business.
To know more about or for any assistance in listing your property to Google Vacation Rentals, please contact us at info@vafion.com
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