Google’s Hotel Center partners are subject to additional content policies for submitting third-party reviews to Google. Understanding and adhering to these policies will ensure a positive experience for both our partners and their users. For more information on submitting third-party reviews, review the developer’s guide.
Requirements for submission
Certain information is always required to submit third-party reviews, but some details are optional. Follow these content guidelines to ensure that your feed is accepted and your third-party reviews are successfully integrated with Google.
Required information
To be eligible for submission to Google, end user reviews of participating hotels must include all of the following:
- Property ID
- Property name
- The full content of the review, including the review date
- Note: We highly recommend that you also include the month and year of the visit, if possible.
- The number of reviews for the property listing
- The numeric or star rating of the property (for example, 7/10 rating or 1–5 stars)
All reviews should be submitted in their original language. Google may translate reviews at its own discretion.
Optional information
The following information isn’t required, but partners are encouraged to include it if applicable:
- Hotel merchant brand name
- Hotel merchant sub-brand name
- Review ID
- This is a unique ID of a review.
- Reviewer name
- Note: Reviewer names should be submitted as first name + last initial only. Don’t include user names or reviewers’ full names.
- Review URL
- This URL links to a page on the property’s website containing the specific review.
Policies
Partners must comply with Google’s third-party review policies, including the following:
- Adhere to all applicable laws and regulations when collecting and moderating reviews.
- Reviews must be genuine, independent, and unpaid editorial reviews. Where required by law, partners must verify that reviews are genuine and independent before submitting the feed to Google.
- Review URLs must link directly to the page where the review is hosted. Review URLs shouldn’t link to a general landing page.
- Duplicate reviews aren’t accepted. All reviews should be genuine and unique.
- Reviews from third-party or syndicated review sites aren’t accepted. Only reviews that have been directly submitted to the partner providing the reviews to Google are accepted.
- For example, Partner A should only include customer reviews submitted to Partner A’s own site. Partner A shouldn’t include reviews submitted to Partner B’s site, even if the review is for the same property.
- All reviewers must be allowed to express both positive and negative opinions. Reviews may not be edited, altered, or filtered prior to submitting (except to the extent that reviews are removed in the course of routine monitoring for authenticity, abuse, or compliance with the partner’s policies).
- Reviews must express an opinion or appraisal of the property and be submitted with the original, unaltered ratings.
- Reviews can’t be generic, template statements populated by automated data or metrics.
- For example, “Based on X number of responses, on average people experienced X with this business.” is an unacceptable review.
- Reviews for businesses with multiple locations, such as chains or franchises, may only be submitted for the location for which that specific review was written. Reviews for multi-location businesses can’t be aggregated or applied to all or multiple business locations of the same company.
Google reserves the right to not show users any reviews that violate our policies.