How to Set Up Google Things to Do for Your Ski Resort or Attraction

Set up Google Things to Do for a ski resort, park or attraction: eligibility, partner or direct integration, feed rules, landing pages, testing and launch.

Setting up Google Things to Do means getting your tickets, passes and experiences into Google’s travel surfaces through a product feed, then qualifying your booking page for the official site badge. Most operators with fewer than 100 products or locations should go through an approved connectivity partner. Only larger or highly technical teams should integrate directly. This guide walks through the decision, the steps, the feed rules that trip people up and the testing that comes before launch.

It is written for ski resort, park and attraction teams: heads of digital, ecommerce managers and marketers who own the booking funnel. It is not about the Google Tasks app or Google Home to-do lists, which share a similar search phrase.

TL;DR

Check eligibility first: ski resorts, amusement parks, tour operators and rental businesses are among the business types eligible for the operator booking module.
Google strongly recommends an approved connectivity partner for operators or reservation systems representing fewer than 100 entities. Direct integration is for larger systems.
There is no dashboard for adding tickets by hand. Data flows as JSON through a feed, and each upload must be a full snapshot.
Your landing page decides whether you win the official site badge: it must show the ticket or product without extra clicks.
Test every feature in the sandbox, then ask your Google contact to move the settings to production.

What Google Things to Do actually is
Step 1: Confirm you are eligible
Step 2: Choose partner integration or direct integration
Step 3: Go through onboarding
Step 4: Build a feed Google will accept
Step 5: Fix your landing pages
Step 6: Configure availability checking and test in the sandbox
Step 7: Launch, then monitor
Our perspective: the feed is only as good as the commerce behind it
Where Spotlio fits
Common mistakes to avoid
A realistic timeline
FAQ
Sources

What Google Things to Do actually is

Things to Do is Google’s platform for showing travel activity products on its own surfaces. According to Google’s integration overview, partners send a data feed that powers both ads and search experiences. The products appear across several modules, including ads, the attractions booking experience and experience carousels.

For a resort, that means a guest searching “lift tickets near Lake Tahoe” or “Stowe things to do” can see your day ticket, price and a booking link directly in Search or Maps, without clicking through a general article first. That is the value: intent-rich traffic at the moment of decision.

It is also worth being clear about what it is not. It is not a listing you fill in by typing. It is a data integration. Everything depends on how clean and current your inventory data is.

Step 1: Confirm you are eligible

Google publishes a list of business types that qualify for the operator booking module, and it says the list can change at any time. Ski resorts, amusement parks, tour operators and rental services such as bikes, boats and snowmobiles are all named in the eligibility documentation. Read the current list before you invest engineering time, because eligibility is by category, not by how well you think you fit.

One detail matters for operators selling their own experiences. Google grants official product treatment to non-OTA partners who mark inventory as INVENTORY_TYPE_OFFICIAL in the feed. If you are the operator, make sure your feed says so.

Step 2: Choose partner integration or direct integration

This is the decision that shapes your timeline and budget.

Factor Approved connectivity partner Direct integration Best for Operators or systems with fewer than 100 entities Larger systems with engineering capacity Google’s stance Strongly recommended for smaller operators Recommended only if you can meet the technical requirements Technical work Handled mainly by the partner’s platform Your team builds and maintains the feed and checkers Contract Through your partner relationship Content license agreement with Google Ongoing support Partner support A Google technical account manager

The criteria come from Google’s page on approved connectivity partners. Direct integration means complying with developer guidelines, signing a content license agreement and working with a Google technical account manager over time.

A useful way to decide: count your bookable entities. A single mountain with eight ticket types, rentals, lessons and lodging is far below 100. A multi-resort group or a regional destination with hundreds of products may justify direct work, but even then, staffing the maintenance is the real cost, not the first build.

If you want a broader primer on how these integrations fit together, this search engine integration guide gives a general overview of integration options and technical requirements.

Step 3: Go through onboarding

If you integrate directly, the path is formal. Google’s Things to Do Center starter guide says you first complete a Partner Intake form and wait for approval. After approval, Google creates an Actions Center account and gives you two SFTP endpoints, one for development and one for production, accessed with SSH key authentication. Data is delivered as JSON.

Two consequences follow:

There is no web form for individual products. If someone on your team expects to log in and add a lift ticket, they will be disappointed. The feed is the only door.
You need someone who can handle SFTP and JSON. If that person does not exist in-house, that is a strong signal to use a partner.

If you go through a partner, the onboarding is shorter on your side, but you still supply the content: products, descriptions, images, prices, policies and your landing pages.

Step 4: Build a feed Google will accept

Google’s required and recommended fields page explains that products are served on three main modules: Attractions Booking, Experiences and Things to Do Ads. Each module has its own required and recommended fields, which determine eligibility and help performance. Map your products against the module you most want to appear in, not just the minimum for acceptance.

Send complete snapshots, not changes

The feed does not support incremental updates. Per the integration overview, you upload the full set of active products every time. If the feed is not refreshed at least once every 30 days, Google can deactivate all of your listed products automatically.

For a seasonal business this is a real trap. A resort that goes quiet in May and does not refresh its feed until November risks having everything switched off just as the season sells. Automate the refresh on a schedule and alert someone when it fails.

Plan for scale

The product feed overview says the feed accepts JSON uploads and can handle large volumes through sharding across multiple files. Most single resorts will never need this, but a multi-property operator should design for it from the start.

Treat images and data quality as marketing

Google’s guidance is that successful listings need more than a working connection. Operators are advised to use high-quality, product-first visuals, where the product fills roughly 75 to 90 percent of the image, and to keep pricing and availability accurate in real time. Google’s general Ads guidance also notes that keeping at least 10 active product offers in a feed improves performance for free listings and paid campaigns. Treat that as general feed guidance rather than a Things to Do rule, but the principle is sound: a feed with one product looks thin.

Practical examples for a ski operation:

Separate products for adult, child and senior day tickets, rather than one vague “lift ticket”.
Distinct entries for multi-day tickets, lessons, rentals and night skiing, each with its own photo.
Prices that match your checkout to the cent, including any date-based pricing.
Summer products, such as scenic lift rides or a mountain coaster, in the same feed so the listing stays alive year-round.

Step 5: Fix your landing pages

This is where many operators lose the official site badge. Google’s official site policies require inventory to meet the general landing page policy plus specific rules. A generalized homepage that makes users hunt for ticket information can be rejected or denied the badge. Products shown on business listings must be discoverable on the landing page without additional clicks or interactions.

The same page clarifies that the booking page does not have to sit on your main domain. A separate ticketing domain is fine as long as your main website prominently and clearly links to that specific booking page.

A checklist for each product’s landing page:

It opens directly on the product, or on a page where that product is immediately visible.
The price shown matches the feed.
The date picker or add-to-cart is on the first screen, not behind a tab.
Your main site links clearly to the booking page.
It works on mobile, where most travelers search.

When several providers list the same attraction, Google weighs data quality, such as price accuracy, and the owner’s stated preference to decide who gets the badge. Accuracy is therefore not a nicety; it is how you beat resellers to the top slot.

Step 6: Configure availability checking and test in the sandbox

Google’s editable features documentation explains that certain features, including the availability checker and party size limits, are set in the Partner Portal under Configuration > Features. They are environment specific: you must enable them separately in sandbox and production, and a feature switched on in the sandbox does not carry over.

The availability checker probes your booking server to spot stale slots. To meet launch criteria, your system must keep error and unavailable rates consistently low over several days. The default request rate is 1 query per second, so your booking system must be able to answer quickly and reliably at that pace.

A sensible testing sequence:

Test every feature in the sandbox first.
Watch the error and unavailable rates for several days, not hours.
Fix mismatches between feed inventory and what your booking engine actually sells.
Once performance is stable, coordinate with your Google contact to flip the settings to production.
Re-verify in production, because nothing came across automatically.

Availability is the weak spot for resorts, where capacity can change with weather, grooming and lift status. If your inventory is managed in several systems, expect mismatches until they are unified.

Step 7: Launch, then monitor

After go-live, treat the integration as a living channel:

Monitor feed refresh success every day.
Review which products appear on which modules.
Compare booked revenue from Google against your other channels.
Keep price and availability synced through every pricing change, especially early-bird and peak-day adjustments.

Google’s Ads help pages carry a notice that, starting Q3 2026, Travel campaigns are being migrated to new Search campaigns for Travel, with settings mirrored to the closest equivalent (see the Things to do introduction). If you run paid Things to Do campaigns, check your account for what changed and confirm your settings carried over as expected.

Our perspective: the feed is only as good as the commerce behind it

We talk to resort and attraction teams about this a lot, and the pattern is consistent. The Google side is rarely the hard part. The hard part is that prices live in one system, tickets in another, lodging in a third and content on a website nobody has synced. Google then asks for a clean, complete, always-current snapshot of all of it.

That is why we think of Things to Do as a test of your whole commerce setup. If your pricing changes by demand, but the feed shows last week’s rates, you lose the official badge battle to a reseller with fresher data. If your ticket page buries the product, you fail the landing page policy. If you cannot answer an availability check reliably, you do not launch.

Our advice to operators:

Fix the source of truth first. Get pricing, products and inventory managed in one place before you build any feed on top.
Keep control of pricing. Dynamic pricing only helps on Google if the same numbers appear everywhere, instantly.
Design landing pages for conversion, not just compliance. The page Google sends a guest to is the one that earns the sale.
Choose a path you can maintain. A partner you can lean on beats a direct build you cannot staff.

One caution: Google’s list of approved connectivity partners changes, so confirm current approval on Google’s own page before you commit to any vendor, us included.

Where Spotlio fits

Spotlio is a cloud-based platform for ski resorts, parks, attractions and destinations. It combines dynamic pricing, ecommerce for tickets, passes, rentals, lodging and bundles, conversion-focused websites and guest-facing mobile apps, with data integration to on-site access and payments. For Things to Do, that matters because the products, prices and landing pages Google needs all come from the same place you already manage them. You can see how the modules work together on our products page, or start from spotlio.com and tell us how your current stack is set up.

Common mistakes to avoid

Pointing every product to the homepage. This risks rejection or denial of the official site badge.
Letting the feed go stale. Thirty days without a refresh can mean automatic deactivation.
Assuming sandbox settings carry over. They do not. Configure production separately.
Listing too few products. A thin feed performs worse than a complete catalog.
Ignoring price accuracy. It is one of the signals Google uses when choosing which offer gets the badge.
Forgetting the partner path. Many teams spend months on a direct build when a connectivity partner would have been faster.

A realistic timeline

Google does not publish a standard timeline, so any number we gave would be a guess. What you can plan is the sequence: eligibility check, partner or direct decision, onboarding and approval, feed build, landing page fixes, sandbox testing over several days, and the production switch. The longest steps are usually internal: cleaning data and fixing landing pages. Start those before you contact anyone at Google, and the formal process moves faster.

FAQ

Is Google Things to Do free to use?

Google’s free listings can show your products without a paid campaign, and Things to Do Ads are a paid option on top. Costs on your side come from engineering time or partner fees. Check your partner’s terms and Google’s current ads documentation for specifics.

Can I add tickets manually without a feed?

No. Google’s starter guide describes an SFTP pipeline with JSON data, and there is no web interface for adding individual tours or tickets. If you lack technical resources, an approved connectivity partner is the practical route.

Do I need a developer to set this up?

For a direct integration, yes: you need someone comfortable with SFTP, SSH keys and JSON. For a partner integration, much of that work moves to the partner, but someone on your team still has to supply accurate product data and landing pages.

How do I get the official site badge?

List your own inventory as official, keep price data accurate and send each product to a landing page where tickets are visible without extra clicks. Google compares data quality and owner preference when more than one provider lists the same attraction, so accuracy counts.

Why was my feed deactivated?

The most common cause is a missed refresh. Google can automatically deactivate all listed products if the feed is not refreshed at least once every 30 days. Upload a complete snapshot of your active products and set up automated alerts so it does not happen again.