As of 8 September 2026, the vacation rentals unit has disappeared from Google Search results in the European Economic Area. Here is what the Digital Markets Act actually requires, why hotels kept a search unit and vacation rentals did not, and where your properties can still be found.
Google has confirmed to its vacation rental feed partners that, starting as early as 8 September 2026, the vacation rentals unit on the Google Search results page no longer appears to users in European Economic Area (EEA) countries. In its notice, Google described the change as part of ongoing work to comply with the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA), stating that it is "not currently able to display the current vacation rentals unit on Search in the EEA" and is therefore removing it. Google added that it hopes to bring a vacation rentals experience back to the EEA in the future, but gave no commitment and no timeline.
For accommodation partners distributing through NextPax, no action is required. Feeds continue to run, and vacation rental content continues to power consumer experiences outside the EEA and outside the Search unit. But the change is worth understanding properly, because it is not a product decision Google made freely — it is a regulatory outcome, and the same regulation is reshaping how every travel supplier is discovered in Europe.
The Digital Markets Act is EU legislation that applies to a small number of very large platforms designated as "gatekeepers", companies that operate core platform services through which business users reach end users at scale. Google Search is one of them. The DMA does not judge whether a platform's product is good or bad for consumers; it sets ex-ante rules about what gatekeepers may and may not do, and it applies them regardless of outcome.
The provision that matters here is the prohibition on self-preferencing. Under Article 6(5), a gatekeeper may not treat its own services and products more favourably in ranking, and in the related indexing and crawling, than similar services or products offered by third parties. Ranking conditions must be transparent, fair and non-discriminatory.
That is the crux of the travel problem. A rich, interactive unit sitting at the top of a search results page, drawing on Google's own aggregated inventory and holding the user inside a Google-owned experience, is very difficult to reconcile with a rule that says comparison services, online travel agencies, metasearch sites, listing platforms, must not be ranked below an equivalent first-party surface. The European Commission has pursued this point persistently. In July 2026 it fined Google €460 million in a case centred on the favourable treatment of its own services, and the DMA allows penalties of up to 10% of global turnover, rising for repeat infringements. The commercial incentive to comply, quickly and visibly, is considerable.
This is the question we have heard most from partners this week, and the answer is not that Google values hotels more highly. It is that hotels had a compliance solution ready and vacation rentals did not.
Over the past period, Google and the European Commission worked through a redesigned layout for travel results in the EEA. The result is a results page split into clearly separated units: one for third-party aggregators and comparison sites, and one for direct suppliers such as hotels and airlines. Crucially, the supplier unit has been stripped back. In the EEA it no longer carries the features that made the old format so effective, live pricing, date-based availability filtering, and descriptive qualifiers such as "boutique" or "budget", and the same restrictions extend to AI Overviews and AI Mode. What remains is a flatter, more anonymous display: essentially a list of suppliers rather than a shoppable booking surface.
It is a compromise, and not a comfortable one for anybody. Google argues the restrictions harm the businesses they are meant to protect, pointing to reports from airlines, hotels and smaller suppliers of free direct booking clicks falling by as much as 30% since the changes began, and it has been running short tests in Germany, Belgium and Estonia that remove hotel features altogether in order to measure the trade-off. Aggregators and several hospitality associations take the opposite view and see the new layout as a move toward a level playing field. Either way, hotels have a format that both parties can live with while the argument continues.
Vacation rentals have no such format. The unit was built around exactly the features the DMA regime now restricts, and no stripped-back equivalent has been agreed. Faced with a unit it could not make compliant in time, Google removed it rather than risk further exposure. Google has told partners it cannot commit to whether the hotel solution can eventually be applied to vacation rentals; it is currently gathering data on how that solution is performing for hotels before deciding anything further.
The removal is narrower than the headlines suggest. It applies to one unit, on one surface, in one region. Specifically:
Google Search outside the EEA is unaffected. The vacation rentals unit continues to serve users in the rest of the world, and inbound demand from non-EEA source markets into European destinations continues to flow through it.
Google Maps continues to surface vacation rental content to users in the EEA.
Google Travel at google.com/travel/search remains available to EEA users, and vacation rentals continue to be showcased there, including within the hotels section, where supply types are mixed.
What has gone is the top-of-page unit on the general Search results page for EEA users, which is, admittedly, the surface with the highest incidental reach. A traveller who types a destination into Google from Amsterdam or Madrid will no longer see vacation rentals presented there. A traveller who goes to Google Travel, or who searches from outside the EEA, still will.
Practically, nothing needs to change in how you work with us. Feeds continue as they are, and there is no configuration, opt-out or resubmission to handle. If you track channel performance closely, you may see EEA-sourced impressions and clicks attributed to Google Vacation Rentals decline from early September; that is the expected effect of this change and not an indication of a feed or content problem.
Strategically, there is a more durable lesson. A discovery surface that a large part of the European market relied on was withdrawn at short notice for reasons entirely outside the industry's control, and with no timeline for its return. That is worth holding onto. Regulatory risk now sits alongside algorithm changes and commercial policy shifts as a reason why demand should never be concentrated in a small number of channels. Partners whose distribution is spread across OTAs, metasearch, listing sites, GDS and corporate travel programmes, alongside their own direct booking engine, absorb a change like this as a line item. Partners dependent on one dominant source feel it as a quarter.
The honest answer is that nobody knows yet. Google has said it hopes to return a vacation rentals experience to the EEA and will keep partners informed. It has not committed to a solution, a format or a date, and it has been explicit that whether the hotel approach can be extended to vacation rentals depends on data it is still collecting. The wider DMA process is also unfinished: Google has put further formats to the European Commission, including side-by-side units that let users choose between comparison sites and direct supplier links, and the Commission's assessment of those proposals will shape what any future vacation rentals unit is allowed to look like.
NextPax is monitoring the situation closely and is in contact with Google on behalf of our connected supply. We will inform partners as soon as there is anything substantive to report, a proposed format, a test, or a timeline. Until then, your distribution continues to run, in every market and on every surface that remains open.
If you would like to review how your properties are currently distributed, or discuss broadening your channel mix, your NextPax account manager is available to walk through it with you or discover it yourself in NextPax Matchmaking, an AI powered engine that matches your accommodations with the right distibution channels.