Temporarily Close

[Belen C]

Hi! hope everyone is safe and conscious about whats going on.

Im curious about the Temporarily Close that start appearing in different listings. For what i read people have to contact the support to mark their business like this, but as well that soon it would be available directly from the dashboard.

But i recently saw that in some restaurants that i manage it automatically change to Temporarily Close. This is maybe cause they are located in Spain? Or why?



As well im really curious what is going to happened to hotels. My clients are hotels chains and i would like to know if this option is also available for this business category. As many knows this business category is completely different from most to not say all of the others.
Any information about this is really appreciate

And again stay home

Thanks

 

[klharris08]

Hey so this is due to Google automatically knowing which geographies and which industries are govenmentally shutdown. Google announced they would be closing down some businesses they know have to be closed. So Spain's government said restaurants are shutdown, so Google just auto-temporary closed them. Here is a blog announcement from Google on the issue.

COVID-19: How we’re continuing to help

The latest developments in our ongoing global response to COVID-19 and how we’re helping people stay safe, informed and connected.

blog.google

From what I've seen this isn't happening to every location in an industry it's kind of hit or miss. I don't know if it will include hotels, but really just monitor your locations and if Google auto-temporarily closes one of your locations (by mistake) you'll need to contact GMB support to get it reinstated.

 

[Lluc]

Hi @klharris08,

Thank you for your answer!

The Spanish government has shut down by law restaurants and bars but not hotels, I believe. It's the independent hotels and hotel chains themselves that are closing out of responsibility, some are even offering them to the local government as "hospitals". Some hotels close to the airport remain open to accommodate travellers, tourists, etc and at the disposal of the government. This also implies that many people have lost their work.

So, unless the government declares that hotels must close or we know what "other authoritative sources" are and convey this information, the best is to wait until they make this option available to all business, right?

Since Monday, we've had several clients asking about marking the hours as closed or to use the special hours' feature. Out of precaution, we have not done either so far. Clients are concerned that while the location remains open, people can leave reviews or questions and they simply don't have the resources to answer them at the moment.

We have tested on our own GMB profiles, marking the hours as closed and using the special times feature. We are also monitoring GA and GSC.

Google's recommendation was to use Google Posts and update the description field, both are unavailable for hotels on GMB.

What we have focused on, since last Friday, was reviewing all profiles manually, checking for any "pending updates" or notifications.

We have prepared Q&A's for each hotel and published Google Posts in several languages on the hotel chains headquarters profile (with very low visibility and in some cases with a different business name to the different brands a hotel chain may have) linking to the respective official press release of the chain.

Uploading photos/images with the governments latest information, hygiene recommendations or even the official press release was also an idea, but it was only a few days ago that they solving issues with photos on Google Posts...

We've also read about the new Schema for events, but we don't think it would apply to our hotels.

Hope everyone is keeping safe and thanks for being responsible.