Early Check-in, Late Check-out and Luggage Storage Across OTAs

Google's lodging schema carries a baggage storage field, described as the provision for guests to leave bags at the hotel before the official check-in time. It carries no field for early check-in and no field for late check-out. That distribution is almost the inverse of what guests actually ask about: bag storage is the favour most hotels grant without thinking, and the two that cost a room night of availability are the ones with nowhere structured to live.

The consequence is predictable. A guest reads the published check-in time, sees nothing about arriving earlier, and arrives at 11:00 assuming it will be fine - because nothing on the page said otherwise, and because the last three hotels did accommodate them. The listing was not wrong. It was silent, and silence on this field is read as permission.

So the published times are only half the answer. The check-in time says when the room is ready. What a guest needs to know in addition is whether arriving before it is possible, at what cost, and with what certainty.

For early check-in and late check-out there are really three positions a property can take, and each deserves different wording. The exception may be unavailable, in which case say so plainly and save everyone the conversation. It may be available on request and subject to availability, which is the most common and most abused answer. Or it may be guaranteed for a fee, which makes it a product rather than a favour.

The middle answer is where the trouble is. 'Subject to availability' is honest when the property genuinely cannot know until the day, and dishonest when it is used to avoid saying that early arrival is effectively never possible in high season. A guest who reads it as a soft yes has read it the way most people do. If the realistic answer is no for four months of the year, publishing that is better content and a better arrival.

Where the exception is paid, publish the price and the basis the same way you would publish any other charge - an amount, a currency, and what it buys. A late check-out sold as 'half the room rate' with no rate on the page is not a published price.

• Not available: say so, and point to luggage storage instead.
• On request: say what determines it and when the guest will know.
• Guaranteed for a fee: publish the amount, the currency, and what it includes.
• Avoid 'subject to availability' where the honest answer is seasonal or rarely yes.
• Say who to ask and when - at booking, the day before, or on arrival.

Bag storage is offered by most properties with a reception and published by far fewer. It has a structured field, it costs the property almost nothing, and it answers a question that otherwise arrives as a message, a phone call, or an anxious guest in the lobby at 09:00 with a suitcase.

Publish more than the boolean. A guest wants to know whether storage is available after check-out as well as before check-in, whether it is a staffed room or an unattended corner, whether there is a charge, and how late they can collect. The field says the service exists; the description is what makes it usable, and it also sets the expectation that prevents a complaint about an unattended luggage room.

For a property without a staffed reception, the honest answer may be that storage is not possible, and that is worth publishing explicitly. A guest planning a late flight needs to know that before they book, not after they have checked out.

• ✓Set the baggage storage field where the service genuinely exists.
• ✓Say whether storage is available before check-in, after check-out, or both.
• ✓State whether the area is staffed or unattended, and whether anything is excluded.
• ✓Publish any charge, and the latest collection time.
• ✓Where storage is not possible, say so rather than leaving the field unset and silent.

Because none of this is structured, it is written by hand in whichever text box each channel offers - and written at different times by different people. One channel ends up with a generous paragraph from a quiet season, another with a restrictive one written after a bad summer, and a third with nothing at all. Every version is somebody's honest answer from a particular moment, which is exactly how a property ends up contradicting itself.

Pricing drifts the same way. A late check-out fee set three years ago survives in a description nobody re-reads, while the desk charges something else. Because the figure is prose rather than a priced product, no system flags the difference.

The third cause is a policy change that is never written down at all - a property that stops offering early check-in during peak season, or starts charging for storage. Operationally it is a decision; editorially it is invisible until a guest quotes the old wording back at the desk.

• Each channel carries a paragraph written at a different time.
• An old fee survives in a description while the desk charges a new one.
• A seasonal restriction is applied without being published.
• Storage becomes chargeable and the free wording stays live.
• A channel added later never receives any of these answers.

Audit these by asking the desk what they actually say when a guest asks, then comparing that against every listing. The failure here is rarely a contradiction between two published values - it is one published answer, one absent, and one out of date, which a field-by-field comparison will not surface because two of the three have nothing to compare.

Write one canonical paragraph covering all three exceptions, publish it in the same words everywhere, and set the baggage storage field to match. Then re-read the live pages, because a description edit is the kind of change that quietly fails to publish.