Google Drops Costs for Hotels and Resellers to List Rates in Price-Comparison Search

Google on Tuesday changed how its hotel price-comparison search works worldwide. The search giant made it free for hotels, online travel agencies, and metasearch brands to list room rates in its boxed pricing module for individual properties. Google has long had a price comparison tab on any given property's listing within its hotel search interface — found via google.com/travel. Until Tuesday, the search titan only showed paid advertisements when users clicked on the "prices" tab. It has now made those booking links free. It hopes to entice hoteliers and resellers to participate more. "This will be a big boon to users coming out of the pandemic who are eager to travel again," said Richard Holden, vice president, product management, travel at Google. "This is also an opportunity for us to show that we have a full range of pricing." The move comes as the pandemic has dried up travel advertising. Google Woos Hotels The company has been testing the free booking links for "a number of months" and has gotten "positive user engagement," Holden said. "From the largest OTAs [online travel agencies] to small hotels, across the board, we're driving more traffic for the ecosystem as a whole," Holden said. [caption id="attachment_421527" align="alignright" width="300"] A sample listing of free hotel booking links. Source: Google[/caption] Google will continue to display "Hotel Ads." The company will keep up to four of these labeled hotel ads in any given hotel booking module. When a person searches fo