Room Bundles – data that allows users engaging with Hotel Ads to select a specific room rate – are now showing in some hotel-specific Google Search results.

When searching for a specific hotel, all looks normal. Both the Knowledge Panel and the standard “localuniversal” ads are showing:

However, when a user clicks the link to “View more rates” in the bottom of the screen shot, just right of center, they are shown a new experience allowing them to view the individual room options for that hotel:

This differs from the previous experience which would have just shown more advertiser links after the click, without room specific details. Room Bundles have previously been shown in the Hotel Finder experience, but to our knowledge this is the first time they are showing in the Local Universal experience.

When pulling a Hotel Finder result for comparison, we also found this note, which appears to indicate that Hotel Finder has been officially retired a standalone product. This is a move we predicted last year and shows Google’s focus on integrating advanced hotel search directly into the core search experience:

What these changes mean

Room Bundle data getting in front of more users means that advertisers will have to consider a few things:

• How much traffic is going to specific room bundles, and how are those bundles performing?
• Are users engaging with this data in such a way that it makes sense to consider updates to landing pages that treat clicks on room bundles differently?
• Does the new experience materially change the click curve, since the advertisers in position 3 are behind a new consideration point (what room?) in the new experience?
• Is room data cleanly formatted, human readable, and enticing to users that will be searching at this level of detail?

I would expect the future of this experience to include better filtering, search, and comparison options for users that want to really narrow down their search to the perfect room.

Even though traffic to Hotel Ads has risen sharply, traffic to the Hotel Finder placement has continued to decline over time. This shouldn’t have any material impact on advertisers as we see less than 1% of traffic generated by this placement today.