Reservations End-to-End Integration Policies

The following integration policies apply to the Reservations End-to-End integration.

End-to-End Policies

Please read through the following integration eligibility criteria before beginning an integration. Partners must meet the following requirements and policies to be eligible to integrate with the Actions Center's Reservations End-to-End integration.

While the following requirements are necessary components of eligibility for the Actions Center program, meeting the requirements does not guarantee a partner will be eligible to integrate or go live with the Actions Center.

Failure to meet the requirements and policies may result in integration, merchant or services being suspended or removed from the platform.

General Platform Requirements

  1. Partners must collect and handle all merchant and user data, including any personally identifiable information, in a manner compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and any other applicable privacy laws.
  2. Partners must be authorized to make bookings on behalf of their merchants.

  3. Partners must have direct access to merchants' availability/time slots in real time (ie. partners must be able to respond to availability requests from Google in less than 1 second).

    • Special case: We do support reservations that require asynchronous confirmation from the merchant, but the reservation flow must be based on an available time slot. Partners must have real time availability, i.e. through merchant online systems, even if it requires confirmation from the merchant to finalize the reservation.

  4. Partners must have comprehensive inventory for their merchants. Merchants with partial or distressed inventory may not be eligible.

  5. Partners must have 30 days or more of merchants' availability.

  6. Partners must support online cancellation of bookings.

  7. Partners requiring pre-payments must abide by the Actions Center's payment policy, their payment processors must be in the following supported list and accept tokenized payments.

  8. Partners must be able to provide accurate pricing data for the cost of services and abide by the Actions Center's pricing policy.

  9. Partners must be able to meet the Actions Center technical Reservations End-to-End integration requirements.

  10. Partners must abide by the Actions Center's merchant and services eligibility requirements.

  11. Partners must abide by the Actions Center's support and maintenance guidelines.

  12. Partners must maintain acceptable error rates defined in Launch and Monitoring guidelines.

  13. All bookings must be confirmed automatically in real time with the exception of bookings made with an async integration. Bookings made through an async integration must adhere to the Async guideline.

  14. Partners must abide by the Actions Center's vertical or feature specific policies (Offers, Payment, Online services and Dining).

  15. Partner must maintain standard quality content for merchant name, address, services name and description per guideline.

Food Menu Policy and Requirements

Please read through the following integration eligibility criteria before beginning an integration. Partners must adhere to the food menu policies and meet the following requirements to be eligible to integrate. Please note that Google reserves the right to display menu & dish data in ways that are helpful to users.

Failure to meet the requirements and policies may result in integration, merchants or services being suspended or removed from the platform.

Policy and Requirements

  1. Partners must not send prohibited information (see details) in menu feed such as foul language, prohibited images, personally identifiable information (PII) or user generated content.
  2. Partners should not use the menu feed to share non-menu items such as services (ex: curbside, promotion codes, etc.).
  3. Partners are required to provide all required data in Reservations E2E menu spec or Ordering Redirect menu spec (max file size 2MB). The technical requirements are addressed in the Reservations E2E menu spec or Ordering Redirect menu spec by marking fields as optional/required.
  4. Partners should only provide menu items available for the corresponding restaurant locations.
  5. Partners must send a complete menu for each location. Merchants with incomplete menus may not be eligible for display.
  6. Partners and merchants are required to ensure menus are accurate and should provide updates on a daily basis.
  7. Menu items photos should be well-lit, feature one in-focus menu item, must not include people or other non-food images, and must conform to image spec (see photo guidelines).
  8. Prices should be shown, per menu item, without tips, taxes or fees; unless required by local laws and ordinances. Partners must explicitly provide local currency.
  9. Specialty menus are supported and should be removed when no longer available (ex: prix fixe, seasonal, limited time specials).
  10. Merchants are required to provide menus in a text-based format, enabling users to select and add items to their order. Menus presented solely as images are not permitted.

Payments Redirect Policies

This section specifies the general and feature-specific policies for implementing payments redirect on the Actions Center. To create a consistent experience for consumers, merchants, and partners using the Actions Center, inventory requiring payment must adhere to the appropriate guidelines. Failure to adhere to these policies will lead to suspension of your integration.

General

These policies apply to all payment dependent inventory on Reserve with Google:

  1. The amount charged to a user must be the same amount specified in the terms of the transaction, in compliance with applicable laws.
  2. Partners are responsible for updating availability using a real-time update (RTU) or ensuring BatchAvailabilityLookup calls reflect accurate slot availability.
  3. No charges should be made to a user that are not explicitly agreed to at checkout, as articulated using our payments configuration process.
    • Payment terms contained within the linked Terms of Service page do not satisfy this requirement.
    • No charges should be made to the user for any 'credit-card required' transactions that are solely meant to authenticate a user.
  4. For in-person services1, all payments must occur at the time of booking or in-person only. Solicitation of payment by any other means is strictly prohibited.
  5. The transaction must be displayed and charged in the currency of the location of the merchant (currency is specified using the payments configuration process). No currency conversions may take place.

1. All in-person services, not counting those provided through this integration such as prepayments and deposits

Landing Page Requirements

  1. The landing page must be the start of the booking flow with the party size and time slot preselected.
    • If the table slot selected is no longer available, this should be clearly communicated to the user upfront, prior to any required step for checkout or account login.
  2. The landing page must not be the platform provider's homepage, a login page, or any other pages.
  3. The first step of the deep linked landing page cannot be a paymentwall, where users cannot view related metadata of their reservation unless they provide payment details.
  4. To provide an optimal and seamless user experience, within the booking flow we recommend providing a Guest Checkout option when possible.
  5. The linkout and landing page cannot require that the user download an app to complete the booking flow.