Could I set a Cruise as an Event in Schema mark up?

[NoWayAsh]

Hi there,

We are now in the process of implementing a JSON-LD mark-up solution and are building cruises as an event.  Will this work and can we get away with this without penalty?

Previously they have been marking their cruises as events using the data highlighter and this has displayed correctly in the SERP.

The ideal schema would be Trip but this is not supported by Google Rich Results yet, hopefully they will support this in the future.

Another alternative would be product but this does not display rich-results as we would like. Event has the best result in terms of how the information is displayed. For example someone might search "Cruises to Spain" and the landing page would display the next 3 cruises that go to Spain, with dates & prices.

The event location would be the cruise terminal, the offer would be the starting price and the start & end date would be the cruise duration, these are fixed dates.

I am interested to hear the communities opinion and experience with this problem.

[effectdigital]

I honestly think if you're going to pick one of the two (though neither is quite right), event makes much more sense than product does. It's not like someone is physically buying the actual cruise ship, instead they're paying to spend 'time' at a 'venue', the venue just happens to be mobile instead of stationary

Someone else went on a similar journey of discovery in 2017, here: https://www.webmasterworld.com/html/4844938.htm

... kind of interesting. It highlighted that Ticket schema might be one possible option: https://schema.org/Ticket. There are actually lots of references to "ticket" within Google's event schema documentation: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/event (ctrl+F for "ticket")

Apparently lots of cruise operators do use event schema, never heard of any of them using product schema

[NoWayAsh]

Thanks for sharing this information. Its helpful, thank you

[willcritchlow]

I don't know of an absolute / definitive answer. If it were my site, I think I would be happy to take the chance with Event markup since there is no perfect match, as you say.

Evidence in each direction:

1. Yes - this is OK - Google's schema page talks about "If the event happens across several streets, define the starting location and mention the full details in description.
2. No - this is not OK - the same page says "Don’t promote non-event products or services such as "Trip package: San Diego/LA, 7 nights" as events".

The reason I wouldn't be too concerned about the "no" side is that I think it is reasonable to read that as being about things like flights where the point is getting to the destination rather than things like cruises which are arguably events in their own right.

Good luck!