How to send 3rd party reviews to Google

This article includes details about how to send 3rd party reviews to Google. The developer guide can help to answer many basic questions and provide instructions on how you can integrate your reviews with Google.

Before you begin

Every partner integration potentially requires back and forth communication between stakeholders to fix issues. We are providing some of the highlights of what to expect and common issues. This can potentially save unnecessary communication with partners and troubleshooting of data for the Engineering team.

Instructions

• Content License Agreement (CLA) and contract signing as necessary. Please reach out to your sales rep to review your contract status.
• Listing feed update (passing the reviews to Google).
  • Hotel partners can pass their hotel reviews alongside the other information in the hotel list they share with Google. Learn more in our developer's guide.

Common issues

• Values in the XML (what is acceptable and what is required).
  • You should follow the syntax for reviews based on the XML schema for reviews.
  • Special care for these values:
    • <author> should be reasonably obfuscated to not reveal any personally identifiable information.
    • <date> is the date when the review was written.
    • <servicedate> is the time that the reviewer visited the listing (at least the year and month).
    • <title> is only for reviews of type “Editorial”.
    • <rating> should only be numerical values.
  • If no value is available for a review (for example, no rating value or no author name), you should avoid sending substitute values like “N/A” or “Not Available” because it will prevent the file from processing. It is sufficient to leave the values empty.
  • Any listing or review without a rating and listings with no valid reviews will not be shown.
• Separate XML files for reviews.
  • You can send separate XML files that only contain reviews and Hotel IDs. This way the larger amount of content can be separated from the hotel information in separate files. It is recommended to keep XML files sizes around 100MB for faster processing. Note that these files might not be valid against the XML schema for listings, as they lack some information in the XML file. Learn more about XML formatting for reviews
• Review URLs (default, static URLs, dynamic URLs, additional dynamic parameters).
  • Static URLs: Each review contains its own URL within the XML tag.
    • If your URL requires information such as a separate hotel ID that we don't have easy access to, you may be asked to fill in the static URL and provide us with a template of dynamic parameters to append.
  • Dynamic URL: You can share a dynamic URL for a landing page so that review URLs can be generated based on dynamic variables like hotel id. Learn more about XML formatting for landing pages