Eight years ago, Google took a major step into the travel space by acquiring ITA Matrix Software, a travel industry software company best known for its Matrix flight search. After using that acquisition to launch Google Flights, the company has continued expanding into increasingly varied sections of the travel space. Here’s a few of Google’s travel-related projects, and how they’re changing the industry and the travel booking experience.
Google Travel changed the game with Google Flights
GoogleFlightsFast, Simple Searches with Google Flights
For many of us, Google Flights has replaced search-aggregation sites like Kayak or Skyscanner and individual travel websites like Orbitz and Priceline as the first (and often only) stop for flight searches. Although those sites can still be useful for booking travel.
GoogleFlight's clean, ad-free interface, lightning-fast searches, and user-friendly notifications about cheaper flight options at nearby airports or on other dates have changed our expectations for flight search engines – and advanced features like calendar search, price tracking, and the Explore map (which lets you see prices for a variety of destinations from a single city) are also super useful. I
Flights Google is also great for transparency, providing information about on-time performance and carry-on baggage fees – making Google Flight a more reliable and accessible source of information than some airlines’ own websites. And it’s hard to beat the convenience of going directly to the airline’s check-out page with a single click – or, in an increasing number of cases, booking directly through Google with your saved identity and payment details. Don't forget to use one of best credit cards for travel miles to maximize your flight purchase.
Google Hotels and Google Maps
Rather than creating a separate hotel search engine, Google has built hotels right into their existing Search and Maps efforts making searching from your phone even easier. Simply searching for “hotels in Barcelona” will give you a search box to specify your dates, then give you a listing of hotels and prices. You can easily pan and zoom on the map to find hotels in the neighborhood you want, then view photos or check out Google Street View to get an idea of the neighborhood.
Like Google Flights, once you find the hotel you want, one button will take you to a booking page on the hotel website or online travel agency of your choice. The integration with Google Search will likely result in many people using it almost by accident – once they realize they can do all of their research in one place, they may no longer feel the need to search individual hotel chain websites or directly on travel agency websites like Priceline and Hotels.com.
Using Google Trips to Organize (and Discover) Travel Plans
For Gmail or G Suite users, Google Trips is perhaps the most straightforward way to organize your travel plans imaginable. It automatically detects incoming emails with travel-related content (flights, hotels, and car rentals, event tickets, and more) and groups them together in one easy-to-access place. Anything that doesn’t get automatically detected can be added to a trip with just a couple of clicks. And the mobile app goes beyond just organizing your data – based on your itinerary, it will suggest activities for your trip, which you can keep or change with a single tap. While it’s not quite as full-featured or customizable as commercial solutions like TripIt or TripCase, it’s more than enough for most casual travelers, and its integration with products like Google Calendar and Google Now makes it super convenient for people committed to the Google ecosystem.
Flight Status Updates
In the past, you often had to go directly to an airline website or a third-party flight tracking service to find out whether your flight was on time – and even then, you’d only get the official flight status as reported to the government, which might or might not be accurate. Google has made it incredibly simple to get just the information you need by simply searching a flight number (AA2126) or airline and route (Air New Zealand from Auckland to San Francisco). And now they’ll do extra detective work to help you anticipate delays before they’re reported – for example, if the aircraft scheduled to operate your flight is delayed, they’ll give you a heads up that your flight is likely to be delayed as well. Hopefully, this will prompt airlines to start being more proactive about their own notifications.
What’s Next for Google Travel?
On the Google Travel blog, the development team says 2018 is the year of the mobile device. They’ve already started rolling out improvements like booking hotels directly through Google instead of redirecting to a partner website and creating a kind of ‘destination portal’ experience where you can switch seamlessly between photos and descriptions, trip suggestions, and flight and hotel searches.
How has Google changed the way you travel?
