serpapi
[Google Hotels API] Price difference in our generated HTML compared Google Hotels UI
In our HTML response, we're listing prices including fees and taxes from the lowest field. However Google Hotels shows prices before taxes and fees as we return in before_taxes_fees.
Booking "Generator Barcelona" directly with the hotel is $85 before taxes and fees, and $104 including those.
Booking through HostelWorld is $94 before taxes and fees, and $104 including those.
Actual Google Hotels lists $85 and $94 for these booking sites as we have in before_taxes_fees.
It seems like Google's default price provided is actually Nightly price with fees but excluding taxes. It was confusing to the customer how the pricing data from Google matches up to the fields we have in our API. It would be great if we could somehow determine whether the Google search considered taxes, fees, or neither, and which response parameter maps to the default Google price shown for a hotel. Intercom
An Enterprise customer reported this discrepancy. They mentioned that this makes it very difficult to use price filters with SerpApi, because even with the filter, you would see stays outside of the price range entered.
Additional context: The problem with using the extracted_before_taxes_fees field is that it only solves displaying a hotel that's above a given price limit. There's an additional problem in this scenario of having a price floor (eg. no stays below $100/night). If we set the $100 as the min_price parameter on SerpApi, hotels where the final price with taxes and fees was above $100 would not even be returned by SerpApi.