Property listing xml feeds are a means of publishing regularly updated data in a consistent format. This allows portals to automatically populate their databases with listing information on your behalf, saving you the time and effort of manual data entry. This data is typically information such as beds, baths, square footage, listing price, photo url’s and other property attributes.
Most XML feeds refresh overnight, with some, like Rightmove in the UK, operating a real-time feed which updates throughout the day. You can build your XML feed using either an XML pre-processor, like FeedSync or a XML scraper, such as the WP All Import Pro plugin for WordPress.
You can then use these dynamic URL’s with the WP All Import Pro server cron jobs to import your listing data into your WordPress site. The plugin has many features which make it easy to set up the correlation between the fields available in your XML feed and those available on your site, for example it can automatically determine whether or not the property has a spa and will add a special property tag for this.
The hotel XSD also requires that you use UTF-8 encoding for the data in your feed file, and that you escape special characters such as apostrophes and quotes (except within CDATA sections). It is also recommended that you validate your hotel feed files against Google’s Hotel XSD.