Google Things to Do: The Complete Setup and Optimisation Guide

Things to Do is the highest-intent travel surface on Google, and most operators either ignore it or misread how it works. Here's the full setup and optimisation playbook.

A traveller lands in Dubai, opens Google on the taxi ride in, and types "things to do in Dubai" or "Burj Khalifa tickets". That person is not researching. They are buying, today, probably within the hour. It's about the highest-purchase-intent moment in all of travel.

Google Things to Do is the surface that sits in that exact moment, and it's the one most attraction operators and OTAs either ignore or misunderstand. I've set it up on both the operator side and the reseller side, and the same confusions come up every time: people think the free listings and the paid ads are two different products, they assume it runs on keywords and CPC bids like a normal search campaign, and they underestimate how much of the outcome is decided by the feed rather than by anything they do inside Google Ads.

This is the full guide. What it is, how the feed works, which third-party platforms get you in, how to set it up, how it actually performs as an ad channel, and how to optimise it once it's live. It's long, because the channel rewards people who understand the plumbing.

The TL;DR: Google Things to Do surfaces travel activities and attraction tickets across Search and Maps, powered by a product feed. One feed drives two things: free booking links (organic, commission-free clicks to your site) and paid Things to Do ads (auction-ranked placement of the same inventory). It's a redirect model, so users complete the booking on your site, and every product must carry location data or it won't serve. If you represent fewer than 100 operators, Google itself tells you to go through a connectivity partner such as Bókun, FareHarbor, Rezdy or Ventrata rather than building the JSON/SFTP feed yourself. The big surprise for PPC people: paid Things to Do ads run as Travel campaigns on Maximize Conversion Value with a target ROAS, not manual CPC. Feed quality, real-time availability, and competitive pricing matter more than bids.

What Google Things to Do actually is

Things to Do is Google's programme for travel activities: attraction tickets, guided tours, and experiences tied to a specific place. It shows up in three places that matter: standard Google Search results, Google Maps, and the point-of-interest panels you see when you search a landmark, museum, or park. A tour operator's products can also appear on their Google Business Profile.

The end-user experience is simple and that's the point. Someone searches a place or an activity, sees cards with photos, prices, ratings, and a booking link, taps one, and lands on the partner's own website to finish the purchase. Google calls this integration type a "redirect", and the distinction is important: this is not "Book on Google". The transaction, the payment, and the customer relationship stay with you. Google is the shop window, not the till.

It differs from Google's Hotel and Flight products in one structural way that shapes everything else: Things to Do is anchored to a point of interest. Google is explicit that activities without location data will not be served as ads. There's no such thing as a location-less experience here. That single rule quietly dictates a lot of your feed hygiene later.

Free links vs paid ads: the distinction everyone gets wrong

Here's the thing people miss. The free listings and the paid ads are not two products. They are two commercial modes of the same feed.

Free booking links cost nothing. Your inventory appears organically in Search, Maps, and the attraction modules, and the click goes to your own site with no commission taken. For an operator, that's genuinely free, high-intent traffic. There's no reason not to have it switched on.

Paid Things to Do ads are the same inventory, amplified. You pay to have your products ranked and prioritised, and placement is decided by an auction that blends your bid with ad quality: relevance, how complete your content is, and how helpful the listing is to the traveller. Photos, ratings, and full titles aren't decoration here. They're ranking inputs.

Most serious operators run both at once: free listings for baseline visibility across the whole catalogue, paid ads layered onto the priority inventory where they have genuine availability and a competitive price. If you take one thing from this section, take this: you are never choosing between free and paid. You're deciding how much of your feed to put money behind.

How the feed works under the bonnet

This is where travel PPC stops looking like search and starts looking like a data pipeline. If you've built a Shopping or Performance Max feed, the mindset transfers, and the discipline in my guide to building a margin feed for tROAS that optimises real profit applies almost directly, because Travel campaigns are value-bid too.

The mechanics, from Google's own developer docs:

Format and transport. Products are supplied as JSON, uploaded over SFTP with SSH authentication. It's a full-replacement feed, meaning you upload the complete set of activities every time. There are no incremental updates.
Freshness. Daily uploads are recommended, and if a product isn't refreshed within 30 days it gets taken down automatically. Your cadence should track how often your prices and availability move, which for most operators means daily.
What the feed carries. Products, titles, images, ratings, real-time pricing and availability, and deep links to the exact booking page.
The modules. The feed feeds several surfaces: an ads module for paid campaigns, an attractions booking module for entry tickets, an operator booking module that shows tour-operator products on a Google Business Profile, and an experiences module for guided tours tied to a POI.

You monitor all of this in Google's Actions Center console, which flags upload status and feed errors. Two engineering realities fall out of this. First, a daily full-replacement JSON feed is real work. Second, that's exactly why most operators don't build it themselves.

The third-party platforms that get you in: connectivity partners

Google is unusually direct about this. If you're an individual attraction, tour operator, activity provider, or a reservation system representing fewer than 100 operators, Google strongly recommends you work with a connectivity partner rather than integrating directly. That's not a soft suggestion. It's the intended path for almost everyone.

A connectivity partner holds the direct Google integration and pushes your feed into Things to Do for you. They handle the real-time availability and price sync, manage eligibility and quality compliance, and turn a multi-week engineering project into something closer to flipping a switch.

Google maintains an official list of approved connectivity partners, and it runs to well over 250 names. Verified against that live list at the time of writing, the ones most operators will recognise include:

Bókun (Tripadvisor's booking platform, and one of the most commonly used routes in)
FareHarbor
Rezdy
Ventrata
Palisis
Regiondo
TrekkSoft
Xola
GetYourGuide

Reservation systems and OTAs such as Bookingkit, Redeam, Tiqets, Viator and Klook appear on it too. The list changes, so check the official page before you commit to a platform, and don't assume a reservation system you already use is on it. Some well-known booking tools are not. Your choice of connectivity partner is effectively your choice of how your feed reaches Google, so it's worth getting right rather than defaulting to whatever you happen to run today.

How to set it up

If you're an attraction or tour operator

Get your Google Business Profile in order. It needs to be verified and discoverable on Google Maps, because the operator booking module depends on it.
Pick your route. Unless you represent 100+ operators, go through an approved connectivity partner. It's the low-friction path and it's what Google wants you to do.
Switch it on in the partner platform. The exact flow varies, but it generally means enabling the Google Things to Do connection, setting your booking destination (your website or booking widget), and submitting products for eligibility review.
Get the feed clean before you scale. Accurate real-time pricing and availability, valid deep links, strong images, and location data on every single product.

If you're an OTA or reseller integrating directly

Confirm you can meet the technical requirements — JSON feed generation, SFTP delivery, and the engineering resource to maintain a daily full-replacement feed.
Submit Google's Things to Do interest form to start the process.
Sign the content licence agreement and assign a technical contact. This is a contracted partnership, not a self-serve signup.
Build, upload, and monitor the feed in Actions Center, and hold your upload cadence.

Either way, the quality checks are the same: location data present on every product, feed kept fresh, listings accurate, and strong content signals for the paid auction.

How it performs as an ad channel

Now the part that trips up experienced PPC people. Paid Things to Do ads are bought inside Google Ads, but they don't behave like a normal search campaign.

Historically there was a dedicated Things to Do campaign type. Google has since folded it into Travel campaigns, which strip out manual keyword building and ad creation. The feed does the matching. You don't write ads and you don't pick keywords.

The bidding model is the big correction to make. You'll still see people online describe Things to Do as "pay per click". Under the bonnet the auction is click-priced, but the lever you actually control in a Travel campaign is Maximize Conversion Value with a target ROAS. It's value-based bidding, not manual CPC. That changes your whole approach: the campaign is only as good as your conversion tracking and your conversion values, which is exactly why I keep hammering that Smart Bidding is only ever as good as the conversions you feed it. Get tracking and values right before you touch the ROAS target.

Targeting is deliberately coarse. You set budget and targets by the traveller's country of residence and by device. No manual keywords, no location radius games. That's worth remembering if you're used to fine location control, and it's a different discipline from the presence versus presence-or-interest location setting that quietly decides who sees your normal search campaigns.

On intent quality, this is as good as travel PPC gets. In-destination activity searches sit right at the bottom of the funnel. The traveller has already decided to go. They're choosing what to do and who to book with, and your card is in front of them at that moment.

How to optimise once it's live

The optimisation levers follow directly from the mechanics:

Feed freshness and accuracy. Upload daily. A stale feed ranks worse and risks a 30-day takedown. This is the single highest-leverage habit.
Real-time availability. Showing a sold-out slot as available destroys quality and burns spend. Sync tightly through your connectivity partner.
Competitive pricing. Your price shows on the card. If you're visibly dearer than a reseller listing the same attraction, your click-through and conversion will suffer no matter how well you bid.
Deep-link quality. Send users to the exact product page, ideally with the date and option preselected, not a generic homepage. Message match to the queried attraction is everything.
Content comprehensiveness. Full titles, complete descriptions, strong images, and ratings feed straight into Google's stated ad-quality ranking factors.
Product prioritisation. Put paid budget behind high-demand, high-margin experiences where you have real availability and a competitive price. Leave the long tail on free listings.
Bidding discipline. Set a realistic target ROAS, let the campaign gather conversion data before you tighten, and never optimise against conversion values you don't trust.

Where this is heading in 2026

Google has publicly confirmed it's consolidating its travel formats, including Things to Do, into standard Search campaigns powered by AI Max, and in mid-2026 it opened this direction up to Things to Do and Events in beta. The strategic intent is clear enough: fewer separate campaign types, more feed-driven automation, and travel inventory showing up across more of Google's surfaces rather than in a walled-off travel silo.

Two honest caveats. First, Google has not confirmed the final details of the beta, including bidding, reporting, feed requirements, and country eligibility, so treat it as a controlled test rather than a settled replacement. Second, the direction of travel is less advertiser control, not more. Manual keywords and ads are already gone, bidding is value-only, and that trend will continue. If you dislike ceding control to automation, this channel will keep testing your patience, and it's the same tension I've written about with Performance Max audience signals. The winning move is the same as with PMax: stop fighting for control you can't have, and pour your effort into the inputs you can, which here means the feed.

A case study (composite, based on accounts I've worked on)

A composite drawn from the attraction and OTA accounts I've helped, not one named client. A mid-size experiences seller with roughly 400 products across several cities, running normal search campaigns and Shopping, with Things to Do switched on but neglected: free listings only, a feed refreshed manually every week or two, and no paid layer.

The problems were all upstream. Stale availability meant sold-out slots still showed, prices lagged the live booking engine, and half the catalogue was missing decent images. We moved feed delivery to daily through their connectivity partner, fixed availability sync so it was genuinely real-time, cleaned pricing and images on the top 50 revenue products, and only then switched on paid Things to Do ads with a realistic target ROAS on those priority products.

Over the following 90 days, on a modest incremental budget, the paid layer brought in meaningful high-intent bookings that the free listings alone had been leaving on the table, and blended ROAS on the channel landed in a healthy range because the traffic was so close to purchase. The uncomfortable lesson: the biggest single gain came before any money was spent on ads, from fixing the feed the free listings were already running on.

Common mistakes

Treating free and paid as separate projects. They run off one feed. Fix the feed once and both improve.
Neglecting the feed and blaming the bids. In this channel, feed freshness, availability accuracy, and price competitiveness outrank almost anything you do in Google Ads.
Expecting manual keyword control. There isn't any. If your instinct is to add negatives and tweak match types, redirect that energy to the feed.
Setting a target ROAS on shaky tracking. Value-based bidding on bad conversion values is worse than useless. Get tracking right first.
Building the feed yourself when you shouldn't. If you represent fewer than 100 operators, Google is telling you to use a connectivity partner. Listen.

Bottom line

Switch on free Things to Do listings today if you haven't. It's free, high-intent traffic to your own site.
Unless you're a large OTA, reach Google through an approved connectivity partner rather than building a JSON/SFTP feed yourself.
Fix the feed before you spend a penny on ads: daily uploads, real-time availability, competitive pricing, location data on every product.
Run paid Things to Do ads as Travel campaigns on Maximize Conversion Value with a realistic target ROAS, and only after your conversion tracking is solid.
Layer paid budget onto your priority inventory. Leave the long tail to free listings.

Most operators I see are losing on this channel before the auction even starts, because they treat it as an ad-buying problem when it's a data problem wearing an ad-buying costume. The ones pulling ahead have realised that in Things to Do, the feed is the campaign. Get that right and the channel quietly becomes one of the most efficient lines in the whole account. If you're not sure whether your feed is helping or hurting, that's exactly the kind of thing a free audit is built to find.

If you'd rather have the whole travel setup, feed to campaign, built and managed for you, that's what my Google Ads management service covers.

Sources and further reading: