Ahead of holiday travel season, Google is making an effort to keep searchers informed about price changes to popular destinations.
A number of new tools have been added to Google Flights and Hotel Search to help users get the best prices when booking travel for Thanksgiving, December holidays, and New Years.
“With the help of the Google News Lab and Polygraph, we created a handy tool that shows how prices change—based on when you book and where you’re traveling—for flights to popular holiday destinations.”
Google will also provide travel tips based on price trends, such as informing users about destinations that have unusually low hotel prices during the upcoming holidays.
Here is an overview of the new tools that have been added.
Google Trends Page
There’s a new Google Trends page dedicated to holiday travel. Users can quickly find hotel deals, flight price trends, and popular things to do in the destination of their choice.
Using a drop-down menu at the top of the page information can be filtered by Thanksgiving, December holidays, and New Years.
Tips in Flight Search
When searching in Google Flights for Thanksgiving travel, Google will show users tips when the price they’re seeing is a “good” price.
Google will rate the price, indicating whether it is unusually low, typical, or high. Information is based on historical prices and prices available so far this year.
Flight Deals in the Explore Map
For those who are flexible on their travel location, Google has added new ways to find deals in the Explore Map in Google Flights.
Users can type in a general destination like “Southern Europe,” then Google Flights will search through thousands of possible destinations and highlight cities with good deals in green.
Hotel Price Trends and Comparisons
Google is adding price insights for hotels, which lets users see how prices evolve over time for the dates of their trip.
In addition, users can compare the price of one hotel to the price of other hotels in the same destination within a similar price range (and star rating) during the same time period.
All of these features are now live.
