Vrbo + Google Vacation Rentals (GVR)

VRBO is the worst. I’m having the same problem. Expedia has my property listed that sleeps for when it sleeps 12 blue pillow, pops up and other booking sites that I don’t have agreements with try to advertise my property within incorrect information in Hospitable does absolutely nothing about it nor can they fix the problem of price tags showing up on maps. Hospitable is my listing company for direct bookings and they can’t even get their own company to show up on the I’m not very happy with Hospitable either

Indeed, it takes a special set of realities to make Airbnb look like the king of customer service, but the last 10 or so months with VRBO have been leaning in that direction.

For my part in trying to get Vrbo to stop syndicating to GVR, I basically gave up. They don’t seem to have a workflow for it… no “opt-out” flag that can be toggled, even on the backend.

I’m also wondering if I possibly misunderstood where GVR gets its data from in the first place. Clearly, PMSs like Hospitable “push” listing data to GVR (I think “syndication” would be the technical term), but it seems that perhaps Google itself also pulls in search results independently of any one site feeding the data to them. This could explain what you’re seeing, ​@jeffrey33615… meaning there’s really no one you can call, no one who can fix it, other than Google themselves (and good luck with THAT). Although to the extent that your place seems to be listed on places you weren’t aware of, you could try to contact each of those platforms and ask, politely, where the hell are you getting my listing data from (or research whether it could be residual stuff from another PMS or property manager you may have used in the past).

So early on after configuring my Hospitable listings to push to GVR, I would see some of my places listed multiple times, as if they were separate properties… and I would see other properties consolidated/merged into a single GVR listing, with multiple “ways to book” listed.

Now though, a couple months later, I’m seeing what I originally hoped I would see, which is a single GVR listing per property, and with just a single “way to book”, showing Hospitable as the “Official Site,” with a link to my direct booking site :-) [see screenshot below of what “mission accomplished” looks like on GVR]

So perhaps over time Google culls and gleans and pares down its results, especially once it picks up on an “official” data source from a PMS that is proactively pushing fresh data to them. 

So ​@jeffrey33615 I know the support team has been swamped lately but I would say to keep on it, and keep working toward the goal of having your listing(s) showing “green” status on the Channels page within Hospitable. And know that it could take weeks for things to shake out on the GVR side, and there might not be anything Hospitable or anyone else can do to speed that up. 

For my part in trying to get Vrbo to stop syndicating to GVR, I basically gave up. They don’t seem to have a workflow for it… no “opt-out” flag that can be toggled, even on the backend.

I’m also wondering if I possibly misunderstood where GVR gets its data from in the first place. Clearly, PMSs like Hospitable “push” listing data to GVR (I think “syndication” would be the technical term), but it seems that perhaps Google itself also pulls in search results independently of any one site feeding the data to them. This could explain what you’re seeing, ​@jeffrey33615… meaning there’s really no one you can call, no one who can fix it, other than Google themselves (and good luck with THAT). Although to the extent that your place seems to be listed on places you weren’t aware of, you could try to contact each of those platforms and ask, politely, where the hell are you getting my listing data from (or research whether it could be residual stuff from another PMS or property manager you may have used in the past).

So early on after configuring my Hospitable listings to push to GVR, I would see some of my places listed multiple times, as if they were separate properties… and I would see other properties consolidated/merged into a single GVR listing, with multiple “ways to book” listed.

Now though, a couple months later, I’m seeing what I originally hoped I would see, which is a single GVR listing per property, and with just a single “way to book”, showing Hospitable as the “Official Site,” with a link to my direct booking site :-) [see screenshot below of what “mission accomplished” looks like on GVR]

So perhaps over time Google culls and gleans and pares down its results, especially once it picks up on an “official” data source from a PMS that is proactively pushing fresh data to them. 

So ​@jeffrey33615 I know the support team has been swamped lately but I would say to keep on it, and keep working toward the goal of having your listing(s) showing “green” status on the Channels page within Hospitable. And know that it could take weeks for things to shake out on the GVR side, and there might not be anything Hospitable or anyone else can do to speed that up. 

 

Congrats on achieving this! I too hope that GVR has come around to restructuring the syndicated feeds the way it’s appearing for you (and some of ours). 

Now if only big G would properly allow GBP & GVR to connect (and truly permit Vacation Rentals) so map visibility without 10 sublayers/filters applied would be helpful for guest searching!

I’m not sure about Vrbo, but I think it’s similar to how Booking.com works. When you create your account, you agree (often without realizing it) to distribute your listings across their partner network.

That’s where the trouble starts, because your listing can end up on dozens of sites, which can hurt your visibility and create duplicates on Google Vacation Rentals.

The real issue is that even if you agreed to this at the beginning, I don’t know of any clear way to fully reverse it afterward. It doesn’t seem like there’s a simple switch to turn off all that distribution once it’s active.

This seems like it is more accurate than some of the complaints here.