What Is VacationRental Schema? The Complete Guide (2026)

Why VacationRental Schema Matters

Google Travel and Google Hotels are among the highest-traffic surfaces for vacation rental discovery. Properties that participate in the Google Hotel Center feed and implement complete VacationRental schema appear in rich property cards with photos, pricing, ratings, amenities, and availability — dramatically increasing click-through rates over unstructured listings.

AI travel assistants (including Google Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity when answering travel queries) increasingly pull structured property data directly from schema markup. A complete VacationRental schema with accurate coordinates, photo arrays, and amenity features gives these systems the machine-readable data needed to describe and recommend your property in AI-generated travel responses.

Required Properties

The 8-Photo Minimum: What Google Requires

Google requires a minimum of 8 high-quality photos for VacationRental listings. This is a hard error in Greadme — listings with fewer than 8 photos lose 15 points and are not eligible for rich results in Google Hotels.

Google's documentation specifies that photos must include the following areas at minimum:

• Bedroom(s)
• Bathroom(s)
• Common areas (living room, kitchen, dining area)

Each image URL must be valid, publicly accessible (not behind authentication), and ideally at least 720px wide. Greadme validates all image URLs and warns on invalid or inaccessible URLs.

Geographic Coordinate Precision

Latitude and longitude must have at least 5 decimal places. This is a Google requirement for VacationRental schema specifically — the precision is needed to accurately locate a property within a building or property complex.

• Valid: 42.36008, -73.99893
• Invalid (too imprecise): 42.36, -73.998

Greadme errors on coordinates with fewer than 5 decimal places. You can add coordinates directly as top-level properties (latitude, longitude) or nested inside a geo object with @type: "GeoCoordinates".

containsPlace: The Accommodation Object

The containsPlace property holds an Accommodation object describing the rental unit's physical details. It contains:

Property Type: additionalType on VacationRental

The top-level additionalType on the VacationRental object describes the property type (as opposed to the room type on containsPlace). Valid values include:

• Apartment
• Bungalow
• Cabin
• Chalet
• Cottage
• Gite
• HolidayVillageRental
• House
• VacationRental
• Villa

Greadme warns when additionalType is missing and deducts 5 points. Using an unrecognized value also triggers a warning.

checkinTime and checkoutTime Format

Check-in and checkout times must be in ISO 8601 time format: HH:MM:SS with an optional timezone offset. Examples:

• "checkinTime": "15:00:00+08:00" (3 PM, UTC+8)
• "checkoutTime": "11:00:00Z" (11 AM, UTC)

Greadme validates that checkin/checkout times match an ISO 8601 time pattern. Greadme's convention requires seconds (HH:MM:SS), so "15:00" without seconds triggers a Greadme warning. Writing "3:00 PM" (12-hour AM/PM) is not valid ISO 8601 and causes a Greadme error.

Review Requirements: datePublished and France's contentReferenceTime

Reviews on VacationRental listings have stricter requirements than standard Review schema:

• datePublished is required for every review (error if missing). This differs from general Review schema where it is only a warning.
• contentReferenceTime is required for French properties. Whenaddress.addressCountry is "FR", every review must include contentReferenceTime — the start date of the reviewer's stay. This is a Google-documented requirement for vacation rental reviews in France. Greadme errors when this field is missing for FR-addressed properties.

VacationRental Schema Code Example

A complete vacation rental listing:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "VacationRental",
  "name": "Beachfront Studio with Ocean View",
  "identifier": "prop-78312",
  "additionalType": "Apartment",
  "latitude": 25.77427,
  "longitude": -80.19341,
  "image": [
    "https://example.com/photos/1.jpg",
    "https://example.com/photos/2.jpg",
    "https://example.com/photos/3.jpg",
    "https://example.com/photos/4.jpg",
    "https://example.com/photos/5.jpg",
    "https://example.com/photos/6.jpg",
    "https://example.com/photos/7.jpg",
    "https://example.com/photos/8.jpg"
  ],
  "description": "Modern studio steps from the beach with full kitchen.",
  "checkinTime": "15:00:00-05:00",
  "checkoutTime": "11:00:00-05:00",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "100 Ocean Dr",
    "addressLocality": "Miami",
    "addressRegion": "FL",
    "postalCode": "33139",
    "addressCountry": "US"
  },
  "containsPlace": {
    "@type": "Accommodation",
    "additionalType": "EntirePlace",
    "occupancy": {
      "@type": "QuantitativeValue",
      "value": 2
    },
    "numberOfBedrooms": 0,
    "numberOfBathroomsTotal": 1,
    "amenityFeature": [
      {
        "@type": "LocationFeatureSpecification",
        "name": "Wifi",
        "value": true
      },
      {
        "@type": "LocationFeatureSpecification",
        "name": "Air conditioning",
        "value": true
      }
    ]
  }
}

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Fewer than 8 images: Greadme errors and deducts 15 points. Always provide at least 8 distinct, high-quality photo URLs.
• Coordinates with fewer than 5 decimal places: 5 decimal places of latitude/longitude precision equals roughly 1.1 meters of accuracy — the minimum needed to locate a specific unit.
• Missing containsPlace.occupancy: This is required inside the Accommodation object. Greadme errors with −20 points. Always specify the maximum number of guests.
• P.O. box in address.streetAddress: Greadme warns and deducts 10 points. Physical street addresses only.
• Wrong time format for checkinTime/checkoutTime: Must be ISO 8601 time format. AM/PM format like "3:00 PM" causes a Greadme error. Omitting seconds ("15:00") triggers a Greadme warning — the full HH:MM:SS format is Greadme's convention.
• Missing review.datePublished: Required for vacation rental reviews (error) — unlike standard Review schema where it is only a warning.

How Greadme Validates VacationRental Schema

Greadme runs a dedicated VacationRental validator with the following key deductions:

Frequently Asked Questions