How to get your hotel on Google

1. Claim and verify your Google Business Profile

This is the free listing that puts your property on Google Maps and in the local pack beside the map. Search your hotel's name first — if a listing already exists (Google often creates them from other sources), claim that one rather than making a second: duplicates split your reviews and confuse the listing. Google then verifies you by phone, email, video, or a posted card, depending on what it offers your property. Nothing else on this list matters as much as getting this step done.

2. Point the profile at a website you own

The profile has a website field, and what you put there decides who gets paid. If it points at your OTA listing, every guest Google sends you for free arrives on a page that charges you commission. Point it at your own booking website, where the same guest books at the same rate and you keep all of it.

3. Fill the profile out completely

A half-filled profile ranks and converts worse than a complete one. Google shows what you give it, so give it everything real:

• Real photos of the actual rooms, exterior, and common areas — not stock imagery.
• The correct category (hotel, guest house, serviced apartment) and any secondary ones.
• Check-in and check-out times, and the amenities you genuinely offer.
• A description of the property in plain language, not a list of keywords.
• The direct booking link, kept current whenever your site address changes.

4. Keep your name, address and phone identical everywhere

Google builds confidence in a business by seeing the same details repeated consistently across the web — your profile, your website, your social accounts, directories, OTA listings. Small mismatches ("St." vs "Street", an old phone number on one listing) weaken that confidence. Pick one exact form of your name, address and phone, and use it verbatim everywhere.

5. Earn reviews, and reply to them

Reviews are both a ranking input and the thing a traveller actually reads. Ask at the moment a guest is happiest — at checkout, or in the thank-you message after a good stay — and never buy or incentivise them. Reply to all of them, including the critical ones: a calm, specific reply is read by every future guest who scrolls past it.

6. Make the site Google sends people to worth arriving on

The profile gets the click; your website has to convert it. That means it loads fast on a phone, states the property's name, location and room types in the page itself rather than only after JavaScript runs, and lets the guest book or message you in one tap. Structured data (the machine-readable description of your rooms and rates) helps search engines and AI assistants describe you accurately — a booking website built for this does it out of the box.

What Google's hotel price comparison is — and isn't

Separate from the free profile, Google shows a price-comparison module for hotels where OTAs and direct rates appear side by side. That module is its own programme with its own technical requirements — it is not something on-page markup alone earns you, and any vendor implying that structured data will put your rates in it is overselling. Get the free profile and your own bookable site right first; that is where the winnable ground is.