Google Search has a number of built-in travel features with machine learning often applied to find the cheapest tickets and hotel rates. To encourage people to book plans for the holiday season ahead of time, Google is rolling out a number of features to Hotel Search and Google Flights.
A new standalone Google Trends page notes pricing changes to popular destinations during Thanksgiving, December Holidays, and New Year’s Eve depending on when flights are booked.
If saving money is your goal, take a day or two off at the start of the week after Thanksgiving; many routes have lower than average prices with a return on Tuesday, November 27th or Wednesday, November 28th.
For Thanksgiving, Google Flights will surface a tip that “shows you whether the price you’re seeing for a given flight is a “good” price.” The “Thanksgiving Prices” card will note whether the fare is low, typical, or high based on “historical prices and prices available so far this year.”
Similar Price Insights that show how cost evolves over the duration of your trip are also coming to Hotel Search.
Say you’re looking to stay at a hotel in San Diego on Christmas. You can now explore that hotel’s historical prices, if it’s lower or higher than usual, and compare that price to other hotels in the same destination within a similar price range–and of the same star rating– during the same time period.
Lastly, Flights is also adding a new “Explore Map” for users who are “flexible” about the destination of their yearly December getaway. Travelers can search broadly by geographic region with locations featuring good deals marked in green.
If you’re flexible on your travel location or dates for an end-of-year getaway, you can search for destinations like “Southern Europe,” then choose either specific or flexible dates. Google Flights searches through thousands of possible destinations, analyzes their historical flight prices and then highlights cities with good deals in green.
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