Direct booking site URLs should escape "unsafe" or "unwise" characters per RFC 3986
The URLs that are built for the Direct Booking site MUST escape characters that are considered "unsafe". This includes the pipe character ( | ), which is pretty commonly used in page titles as a separator that doesn't take up much space.
If these are not escaped, Google Travel will NOT accept the weblink. For example, one of our listings has this for the direct URL:
That should escape the | to %7C:
For reference: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1547899/which-characters-make-a-url-invalid
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/ea8b01f79f966ad10491b4ad9779e6ac?size=40&default=https%3A%2F%2Fassets.uvcdn.com%2Fpkg%2Fadmin%2Ficons%2Fuser_70-6bcf9e08938533adb9bac95c3e487cb2a6d4a32f890ca6fdc82e3072e0ea0368.png)
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Jenn Eddy commented
Note that this can be handled temporarily by manually escaping the characters when entering the weblink. But, the DBS should not be using URLs that might be considered unsafe by third parties.