Google Flights testing low price guarantees with Google Pay refunds

Abner Li | Apr 3 2023 - 8:26 am PT

While spring just started, Google is already looking towards summer travel and is announcing new features, like low flight price guarantees.

Google Flights already uses historical averages to give you an idea of whether current prices are low, typical, or high. A new price guarantee badge — four-color shield icon — will appear when Google is “confident that the price you see today won’t get any lower before takeoff.”

This is part of a new pilot program in the US wherein Google will “monitor the price every day until departure, and if it does go down, we’ll send you back the difference via Google Pay.”

Only flights (one-way and round-trip) that depart from the US that you pay for using “Book on Google” — instead of the airline site — are currently eligible for this price guarantee. More details can be found here, including how:

To get money back, the price difference must be greater than 5 USD. You can receive up to 500 USD back total per calendar year for up to 3 open Price guaranteed bookings at any one time.

Meanwhile, Google’s hotel search is adopting a “swipeable story format” on mobile for hotel discovery. Searching for “Soho London hotels” would result in a carousel of stories that you can open with a right tap showing images with captions and maps. You can swipe up and down to see different locations.

From here, you can tap through photos of the hotel and get a sense of what to expect on-site. With a single tap, you can also save the hotel, pull up more details about the area, or view a summary of what people find notable about the property.

Lastly, Google today officially announced the navigation rail on desktop Maps that we spotted last month. It’s officially referred to as the “Recents tab” to “automatically organize places you’ve searched for on Maps by city.” This clever large screen UX is rolling out globally “starting next week.”