Google Hotels reviews — not available (use another platform)

Google Hotels does not expose review text through StayingAPI. This skill exists so an agent asked for Google Hotels reviews gives the right answer immediately instead of retrying a call that always fails.

[!IMPORTANT] GET /v1/reviews?platform=google returns 400 platform_not_enabled, and no parameter combination changes that. Aggregate rating IS available: GET /v1/search returns guestRating, ratingScale, starRating and reviewCount for Google Hotels properties — enough for "how well rated is this hotel?" (see the google-hotels-search skill). For review text, call /v1/reviews with platform=booking, airbnb or vrbo (skills: booking-com-reviews, airbnb-reviews, vrbo-reviews). For Google Hotels pricing, use google-hotels-compare; for discovery, google-hotels-search.

Setup

If $STAYINGAPI_KEY is not set, read references/auth-setup.md and follow it to get and store the key. A stay_test_ sandbox key works for evaluation at zero cost.

When to use this skill

DO use when the user asks:

• "What do reviews say about this Google Hotels place?" — answer that review text is unavailable and offer the alternatives below
• "How well rated is this Google Hotels hotel?" — the aggregate rating comes from /v1/search

Do NOT use when:

• You want review text from a platform that supports it — install booking-com-reviews, airbnb-reviews or vrbo-reviews
• You want Google Hotels search or price comparison — use google-hotels-search or google-hotels-compare

Required headers

Every request needs:

• Authorization: Bearer $STAYINGAPI_KEY
• User-Agent: your agent's name (e.g. ClaudeCode/1.0).

Base URL: https://api.stayingapi.com/v1.

Platform × endpoint support

Not every endpoint supports every platform. Verified:

platform	search	availability	price	price-compare	listing	reviews
airbnb	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
booking	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
vrbo	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
google	yes	yes	yes	yes	no	no

GET /v1/listing/google/… and GET /v1/reviews?platform=google return 400 platform_not_enabled ("google is not enabled for this endpoint"). Use booking, airbnb or vrbo for listing detail and reviews; use google for search, price and cross-OTA price-compare.

The cross-OTA advantage

StayingAPI is cross-platform: Google Hotels data comes back in the same unified schema as Airbnb, Booking.com and Vrbo, so one integration covers them all. /v1/price-compare resolves a property through the Google Hotels backbone and returns the offers it exposes plus a StayingAPI-computed min and median over those offers, as first-class fields.

Coverage varies by property and by what the backbone returns: some properties come back with several OTA offers, others with a single aggregated-lowest offer (in which case min equals median and offers has one entry, sometimes a direct-supplier rate rather than an OTA). Read offers.length before describing a result as a multi-platform comparison.

Async & partial failures

A live call that has to scrape returns 202 with data.jobId, data.pollUrl and data.estimatedSeconds (the 202 itself charges 0). Poll GET /v1/jobs/{jobId} (free) until data.status is TERMINAL — completed or failed.

• completed → the payload is at data.result (the same schema the sync call returns; data itself is just {jobId, result, status}). meta carries partial, platformResults[] and warnings[]. A completed job may still return an empty result (data.result: []) — the reason is in meta.warnings[] (e.g. no_results), and empty results charge 0.
• failed → HTTP is still 200, not an HTTP error. The failure is nested at data.error (code, type, message, retryable). Detect it with data.status === "failed", not a top-level error. creditsCharged is 0, and meta carries only {requestId, creditsCharged, platforms} — do not read partial, platformResults or warnings on a failed job.

Pace your polling: honour the Retry-After header, back off between attempts, and cap the number of attempts. A tight loop hits 429 rate_limit_exceeded (120 requests/minute).

Known limitations

• Pagination: limit/cursor are accepted where documented, but availability depends on the endpoint and the upstream source — treat meta.pagination as authoritative and stop when hasMore is false or nextCursor is null.
• Externally-sourced ids: a Vrbo id obtained somewhere other than /v1/search may not resolve upstream and can produce a failed job (all_actors_failed). Prefer ids from /v1/search (platformListingId).
• Platform gaps: see the support matrix above — google has no listing or reviews endpoint.

Credits

Number-free by design — failed, empty and blocked calls are never billed, and stay_test_ sandbox calls are always free. Current costs: https://stayingapi.com/pricing · full contract: https://api.stayingapi.com/openapi.json.

Trademark

StayingAPI is an independent service and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Google Hotels. Google Hotels is a trademark of its respective owner.

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