Google has enhanced its flight and hotel search capabilities ahead of the U.S. holiday travel season, while concurrently announcing that it has started offering exclusive hotel discounts to paying users of Google One cloud storage.
Among Google’s flight search upgrades is a new holiday-centric infographic tool, which uses a statistical analysis of historical flight prices across 25 popular U.S. routes to indicate whether fares are higher or lower than usual during the Thanksgiving, December and New Year’s travel periods. The infographic tool is also available for hotel searches, showcasing destinations that have unusually low hotel prices during those holidays.
Google has also launched three in-product offerings across its flight and hotel search platforms, including a Thanksgiving focused pricing feature for U.S. airfare searches. Available on mobile, this Google Flights feature provides insight on whether the price of a Thanksgiving flight is higher or lower than usual based on when a consumer is shopping and their dates of travel.
“The two main stress points that users have while booking flights is that they don’t know what a good price is for a flight, and once they have an idea of a good price, then they don’t know the right time to book. This is always the case when you’re booking travel, but especially when you’re booking travel for the holidays,” said Google product manager Thijs van As during a press event in New York last week.
The second new in-product feature is targeted toward travelers with some flexibility in their planning and uses the Google Flights platform to highlight fares to various destinations that are priced significantly lower than average.
This feature, which will be available globally both on mobile and desktop, will focus on fares that are at least 30% below typical prices.
