Hotel Schema Markup: Telling Similar Hotels Apart

Metro Manila has dense clusters of hotels. Ermita, the Makati central business district, Ortigas Center and the Pasay bay area each hold many properties that describe themselves with the same words: pool, suite, business centre, near the mall. A guest can tell them apart by the logo and the photos. A search engine reading text has less to go on.

What hotel schema markup is

Schema.org is a shared vocabulary for describing things on a web page. Hotel is one of its types, defined as an establishment that provides lodging paid on a short-term basis. It sits under LodgingBusiness and LocalBusiness, so it inherits properties such as address, telephone, geo and aggregate rating, plus lodging-specific ones: amenityFeature, checkinTime, checkoutTime, numberOfRooms, petsAllowed and starRating.

Google's introduction to structured data recommends JSON-LD, a block of code that sits in the page and does not change what a visitor sees. The same page says markup can help Google understand a page and may make results more engaging, and it does not promise a ranking boost. Treat schema as a way to remove ambiguity, not as a shortcut.

Why similar names cause trouble

Two situations come up again and again. The first is a hotel whose name is close to another property or to a generic phrase, so a search for "Bayview hotel Manila" could match several. The second is a chain or group with more than one branch, where guests, OTAs and directories mix up the addresses. In both cases a search engine is deciding whether two mentions refer to the same place. If the name, address and phone differ from one listing to the next, it has to guess.

This is what we mean by disambiguation: giving every system the same short list of facts so the guess is easy. In the glossary, an entity is the thing a search engine believes your hotel to be, and the Knowledge Graph is where Google stores what it knows about it.

What to put in the markup

• name: the hotel's real name, exactly as on the sign and the Google profile. Google's guidelines for representing your business say a name should reflect the real-world name and that extra marketing text or location descriptors can get a profile suspended.
• address and telephone: the same format as the Google Business Profile. Google's local business documentation requires name and address and recommends a primary phone number.
• geo: latitude and longitude with at least five decimal places, which that same page asks for.
• checkinTime, checkoutTime, numberOfRooms, petsAllowed: facts a guest asks about and an assistant can quote.
• amenityFeature: pool, parking, airport shuttle, breakfast. List only what is true today, and name specifics such as "outdoor pool, 7am to 9pm".
• sameAs: the addresses of your other official profiles. Google's organization markup page describes sameAs as a link to your profile on a social media or review site, and says organization markup helps Google disambiguate your organization in search results.

A skeleton looks like this, with a made-up hotel:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Hotel",
  "name": "Example Hotel Makati",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "1 Example Street",
    "addressLocality": "Makati",
    "addressCountry": "PH"
  },
  "telephone": "+63 2 0000 0000",
  "checkinTime": "14:00",
  "checkoutTime": "12:00",
  "sameAs": ["https://www.facebook.com/examplehotel"]
}
</script>

Make the rest of the web agree

The markup only helps if everything else matches it. Check the name, address and phone on the Google Business Profile, the Facebook page, Booking.com, Agoda and any local directories. Our glossary entry on NAP explains why mismatches matter, and the entry on duplicate listings covers the case where an old profile for the same hotel still exists. If you run more than one branch, give each its own page, its own address and its own profile, and do not reuse one description across all of them.

How to check your work

Run the page through the Schema Markup Validator to confirm the code is readable, and compare each fact with the Google profile by eye. Then search your hotel name and a neighbourhood phrase such as "hotel near Ortigas Center" and see which facts appear in the result. Google says it does not guarantee that features built on structured data will show up, so judge the result by whether the facts shown are correct.

If you want to see how assistants read your site, how AI reads your website goes through what they can and cannot take from a page. For the Manila side, see local SEO in Manila.

Questions about a specific property are welcome through the contact page.