Today Google rolled out Google One worldwide. As part of that update they are now offering Google One subscribers (starting at $1.99 for 100 GB of storage) discounts on hotel reservations made via Google search.
Google claims that users will be eligible for discounts of 15% to 40%, if you’ve ever booked a hotel before then you will have likely seen stated similar discounts when in reality those prices are found across all booking platforms. I’m not sure if this is the case with Google, or if they are actually providing real discounts. I wasn’t able to get any discounts to show, so it wasn’t possible to check.
Twitter user @adonazriel did see discounted pricing (see below).
Anyone ever seen the member’s price for on the Google app before? @rustybrick @googlemaps#seo pic.twitter.com/OH7t4aKDB2
— Az Respes (@adonazriel) August 13, 2018
I did a search for Yotel New York for September 3-4th and other sites were showing the $116 price (showing it discounted from $224) where as the Google One price is $57 so it does appear these are real discounts rather than ‘fake’ discounts that are sometimes displayed. It’ll be interesting to see how many hotels decide to participate and what sort of discounts we see. As Google One is a subscription required service, it won’t be possible to use these rates to price match. We obviously need a lot more data points to see if the discounted pricing is real, but it seems positive so far. It’s also worth considering that paying the full sticker price for hotels is never a good idea, we recommend stacking discounts with Hotels.com for example if you don’t care about hotel chains/elite status.
Deals Vs 1 Member Price
It seems that Google will show two different types of discounts. One is ‘deals’ and this is basically just the fluff discounts you’re used to see on other sites. The other is 1 Member Price and these are real discounts when compared to other booking sites. You can select to only search for ‘deals’ and this shows a mixture of the deals fluff discounts and 1 member pricing, unfortunately no option to only see 1 member price.
Hat tip to reader A M &Â Anameofaguy for additional information
