Tag Archives: Flights and Hotels

Stay updated on travel advisories and airline policies


As the spread of COVID-19 continues, we’re seeing more searches for travel-related information—like travel advisories and trip cancellation policies—so we’re making some changes this week to help you find this information faster.


Stay up to date on travel advisories

When you search on Google for information like flights, hotels, or things to do you’ll start seeing COVID-19 related travel advisories or restrictions for your destination, with links to relevant information from your country’s travel authority when possible. This information will appear on the search results page, at the top of google.com/travel, and in Google Maps when you search for hotels. 


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Understanding airline policies for flight changes and cancellations

In response to COVID-19, many airlines have adjusted change fee and cancellation policies. When you search on Google for flights with a specific airline or go to Google Flights, we’ll direct you to our Help Center article with more information on airline policies. These policies may change, so be sure to click through to the airline’s website for the latest information.


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We hope these resources help you stay safe and make the best decisions about travel plans. We'll continue to work on ways to help as the COVID-19 situation evolves.

5 tips for finding the best hotels in 2020

The sandy beaches in Da Nang, the night life of São Paulo, and Korean barbecue from Seoul are all top of mind for people planning vacations this year. According to global hotel search data, people from around the world are interested in traveling to these destinations in 2020.

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When you’re ready to start planning your next vacation, here are five tips to help you pick the best hotel for your trip.

Know when to go

Have flexible travel dates? You can now find the best times to visit or typical hotel prices for specific dates right above the hotel results on desktop at google.com/travel. On the “When to visit” tab, you’ll see how weather, crowds and pricing vary across the year. Check out “What you’ll pay” to find out if prices are low, typical or high for the dates you’re considering (grouped by hotels’ star ratings). If you find out prices are much higher than usual due to a conference or sporting event, you may decide to change your dates.

Narrow down by neighborhood

Part of the fun of traveling is discovering a city’s different neighborhoods—but how do you choose one to  be your home base during a trip? Click on “Where to stay” to get a summary of top neighborhoods, including what each area is known for, its location score, and the average cost of hotels there. Select an area you’re interested in, and you’ll see it highlighted on the map. When you’ve decided which neighborhoods you’d like to narrow your search to, click “Apply” to update results to include only hotels in these areas. 


See personal results

In your hotel results, we’ll tell you if you’ve searched for or stayed at a hotel before or if there are similar options to places you’ve stayed in other cities. We’ll also call out hotels that are close to points of interest you’ve searched for. For example, if you’ve been researching Tokyo Tower, we’ll highlight how far it is from hotels nearby. These personalized results are only visible to you, and you can adjust your account settings to disable them at any time.

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Get the total cost for your stay

When you decide on a hotel and want to confirm the cost before booking, you can now see both the nightly and total price for your entire stay including taxes and fees. In the U.S. and Canada, you can also see the nightly price without taxes and fees. On the “Overview” or “Prices” tab you can choose to see either view when you check availability.

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Resume planning your trip in seconds

Easily continue planning your trip by going to google.com/travel. If you’re signed into your Google account, you’ll see upcoming trips if you’ve received a booking confirmation in Gmail and potential trips you’re still researching. 

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Scroll down and tap “Add shortcut” to add the icon to your phone’s home screen so you can return to planning trips quickly in the future.

Want the best prices for your trip? Google can help.

We’re already a week into August, but there’s still time to book a trip before summer ends--or to get a jump start on holiday travel planning. After you’ve decided where to go for your next trip, these new features can help you get the best price and make travel planning a little simpler. 

Book flights with more confidence

When it comes to finding flights, it’s hard to know what the “right” price is--and even harder to know when to book. We already show you whether prices for a flight route are high, low or typical. Starting today you may see the same insights for your exact itinerary. Plus, for some flights we’ll show you how the price has changed over the past few months and notify you when we predict the price may go up soon or won’t get any lower. 


Flight price insights

On top of this, we’re taking an additional step to give you more confidence when booking a flight. When we predict the price won’t decrease for select itineraries booked between August 13 and September 2, we’ll guarantee the price won’t drop, and we’ll refund you the difference if it does. 

We’ll monitor the price for you and if the price drops any time before departure, we’ll send you an email letting you know once your flight takes off--so there’s no work on your end. This feature is available for select itineraries originating in the U.S. with domestic or international destinations.


Flights price guarantee

Get suggestions to continue planning your trip

If you book a flight and receive a confirmation in Gmail, you’ll see your upcoming trip when you go to google.com/travel. Starting this week, we’ll assist you with recommendations for next steps—such as searching for hotels, restaurants and things to do. When you click on your trip, you’ll see your flights have been automatically added to a timeline. If you haven’t received a confirmation in Gmail for some of your trip reservations, you can now easily add them to your timeline.

Trips Recommendations

Find the best neighborhood, and hotel, for you

When you’re booking a hotel, you may need intel on neighborhoods to stay in and what you’ll expect to pay. In the next few weeks, you’ll see helpful information about top neighborhoods, the best time to visit and typical hotel prices at the top of your hotel results on desktop at google.com/travel globally. 

Let’s say you’re planning a trip to Paris. Once you’ve searched for hotels for your destination and dates, click on “Where to stay” at the top of your hotel results. For each neighborhood you’ll see a description, the average price and more. You’ll be able to filter your results for hotels in a specific neighborhood. 


Hotels market insights

We’ll also help you pick the best place to stay by showing you personalized hotel results including places you’ve searched for or stayed at before, and hotels that are close to points of interest you’ve searched for. 

When you’re ready to go on your trip, you can now use Google Maps to access your travel reservations, explore the city you’re visiting or navigate from place to place. Read more about the new features that make Google Maps the perfect travel companion here. Whether you’re looking for the best flight prices and neighborhood for your stay, or you’re on-the-go during your trip, Google can help with your travel needs from start to finish.

Source: Google LatLong


Take off to your next destination with Google Maps

Not only does Google Maps help you navigate, explore, and get things done at home, but it’s also a powerful travel companion. After you’ve booked your trip, these new tools will simplify every step of your trip once you’ve touched down–from getting around a new city to reliving every moment once you’re home.


Get organized

Now, you can use Google Maps to see all of your flight and hotel reservations in one place–a lifesaver when you’re checking in at the airport or en route to the next hotel in your destination. Simply tap on the three gray lines at the top left corner of your screen, and then on “Your Places”. Then, hit the “Reservations” tab where you’ll see a list of your upcoming trips. Selecting your trip will instantly pull up your reservations, and you can even access them if you’re offline, so no need to worry if you’re off the grid with no service or traveling internationally without a data plan.


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See your flight and hotels reservations right from Google Maps

Get around confidently 

There’s nothing like exploring a city on foot–it’s a great way to take in the sights and sounds of a new place. But it can be hard to know exactly which direction to go. With a beta feature called Live View, you can use augmented reality (AR) to better see which way to walk. Arrows and directions are placed in the real world to guide your way. We’ve tested Live View with the Local Guides and Pixel community over the past few months, and are now expanding the beta to Android and iOS devices that support ARCore and ARKit starting this week.

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Use Live View to see the way you need to go in a new city

Find amazing local food

Real talk: Food is one of the main highlights of any vacation. With Google Maps, you can quickly find restaurants tailored to your tastes with Your Match, see how long the wait is, and even book a reservation without ever leaving the app (and no, we’re not talking about delicious dinner apps). With the popular dishes feature, you can quickly find out what the must-try items on the menu are.


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Find restaurants with Your Match

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See when a restaurant is most crowded, book a table, and find the most popular dishes


Soak in the memories and share them with friends

The best part about any life-changing trip? Reliving the memories, and sharing them with loved ones. If you’ve chosen to turn your Location History setting on, you can now use the updated version of Timeline to easily remember that amazing hole-in-the-wall restaurant you dined at or the cute vintage shop you popped into. You’ll also be able to see all of the places you went to in a country or a city, and even drill down to the categories of places you visited–including restaurants, shops, attractions, hotels and airports. So the next time someone asks you for trip recommendations, you can easily export the places you loved to a list, make notes about exactly what you liked (like the great picnic spot by the Louvre), and share that list with friends and family. 


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Use Timeline to remember your trip and share recommendations with friends

You can expect to see flight and hotel reservations, Live View (in countries where Street View is available), and the new Timeline on your phones in the coming weeks. Reservations and Live View are coming to Android and iOS, and the new Timeline is available on Android. To learn more about Google Maps, check out our website.

Source: Google LatLong


There’s an easier way to plan and organize your trips—here’s how

Travel planning is complicated. The number of tools and amount of information you need to sift through when deciding where to go, where to stay and what flight to take can be time consuming and overwhelming. That’s why today, we’re simplifying the way we help travelers plan trips with Google across devices.

When you’re planning a trip—whether you’re on desktop or mobile—we want to help you find the information you need, fast. Last year, we simplified trip planning by making navigation between Google Flights, Hotels, and Trips easier on smartphones. We’re now rolling this out on desktop as well. You can either go to google.com/travel or search for something like “hotels in Tokyo” or “Vancouver” to find travel information from a variety of sources in one place.


Your trips on desktop


As you plan a trip, your research and reservations will be organized for you in Trips. As we continue to evolve Google Trips, we’re making this information more accessible at google.com/travel, and in Google Search and Google Maps. We’re also adding a few new features to make planning and organizing your trips easier.

One place for all of your trip details

Last year, we started adding your trip reservations for things like hotels and flights to a trip timeline for your upcoming trips, when you’re signed into your Google account and you’ve received a confirmation in Gmail. When you go to google.com/travel, you can now make edits directly to your trips timeline, and in a few weeks you’ll be able to manually add new reservations as well.

Whether you’re packing your bags or finalizing your travel dates, the weather is an important part of every trip. You’ll now see the weather for any upcoming or potential trips at google.com/travel—so you can make sure you’re prepared, rain or shine.

Weather on your trips

Keep track of research and keep planning

It often takes days or weeks to plan a trip. When you need to pick up planning again, we’ll keep track of your trip research across Google. Recent searches, saved places and flights you’re tracking are added automatically to your trips when you’re signed into your Google Account. Soon, we’ll add viewed things to do and saved and viewed hotels to your trips. When you want to continue planning, all of your research will be waiting for you at google.com/travel. If you don’t want to see private results, you can opt out by adjusting your results and web & app activity settings.

When you’re ready to continue researching other parts of your trip, scroll down to see travel articles and find out more about a destination like suggested day plans, popular restaurants around your hotel and events happening during your dates.


Trips research on Gooogle

Continue planning on-the-go 

When you’re on-the-go or visiting a new place, we’ll do more to highlight things to do, restaurants and more with Google Maps. For instance, last year we made it easier to find the best places to see and things to do when using Google Maps to explore a new place. Now, we’ll also help you get the lay of the land when you’re traveling by pointing out popular neighborhoods nearby and what they’re known for.


Maps Popular Areas

And in the next few months, your trips—including reservations for things like hotels and restaurants—will be accessible in Google Maps, too.

Our goal is to simplify trip planning by helping you quickly find the most useful information and pick up where you left off on any device. We’ll continue to make planning and taking trips easier with Google Maps, Google Search and google.com/travel—so you can get out and enjoy the world.

Find and book vacation rentals, with help from Google

Finding a place to stay should be simple. We’ve taken many steps over the years to help travelers find the best options and connect with travel providers worldwide.

In 2018, we redesigned our mobile and desktop hotel search experience to help you find hotels by price, location and ratings and began including vacation rentals in hotel search results. Now, to give you a broader set of choices for lodging, we’re expanding the hotel search experience to include a wider assortment of vacation rental properties worldwide.

Starting with our mobile experience, you can see and book vacation rentals from a variety of partners including Expedia, HomeAway, Hotels.com, RedAwning, Rentals United, TripAdvisor, VRBO and more. In the hotel search experience, you can surface vacation rental properties—be it a cabin in Lake Tahoe or a beach house in Sydney—by applying the vacation rentals filter or clicking on the vacation rentals tip.

Vacation Rentals Tip and Filter

You can narrow your search with price and amenity filters, plus browse photos, read reviews and see rates and availability of the vacation rental property. When you’re ready to book, click “Book” to complete your transaction on the travel partner’s page. All property information and bookings are provided and done by the travel partner.

Vacation Rentals Property Information

In the next month, we’ll bring the vacation rentals filter to the Google Hotels desktop experience as well. We hope this helps travelers make fast, effortless decisions—and with more choices on where to stay, your perfect vacation is just a few clicks away.

There’s still time to plan your perfect spring break trip

Spring is in the air—and for lots of people, that means spring break is right around the corner. 

If you haven’t booked a trip yet, you can try out our travel insights tool to see flight price trends for popular routes or find out which cities have hotel deals during spring break. If you’re still looking for inspiration on where to go, check out top-trending destinations for spring break in the U.S.—four out of the five cities this year are in Florida.

spring break US trending destinations

Whether you’re planning a trip within a certain budget or you’re looking for a hotel that fulfills all your needs, here are a few new features in Google Flights and Hotels that will make travel planning easy.

Get ideas for where to go on any budget

If you have flexibility on where you go but not on how much you’ll spend, you can explore the world map on Google Flights to see all the destinations you can fly to on your budget. For example, say you’re in San Francisco and want to spend less than $150 on a flight. For either specific or flexible dates, you can use a price filter on desktop to set your price limit and see only the destinations you can fly to within this range.


Flights Explore price filter

Once you decide on a destination and start looking for flights, you’ll now see a price insight for most trips—a feature previously only available for holiday dates last year—that shows you whether the prices you’re seeing for flights are high, typical or low compared to what you’d usually find. When we know, we’ll also tell you if the price won’t get any lower or if it’s expected to increase soon so you can make the best decision on when to book.


Flights price context

Find a hotel that fits your needs

Set on your flight but need to whittle down your hotel options? Let’s imagine you’re going to Miami at the end of March, and there are over 300 hotel results for your search. To help you find the right hotel for your trip, apply our new “Deals” filter. This filter uses machine learning to highlight hotels where one or more of our partners offer rates that are significantly lower than the usual price for that hotel or similar hotels nearby. 

You can also view a hotel’s highlights—like a fancy pool, if it’s a luxury hotel, or if it’s popular with families—with expanded pages for photos and reviews curated with machine learning.

Google Maps can also help when it comes to picking a hotel by showing you if a hotel is in a convenient location and near relevant landmarks. Search for hotels near a landmark or point of interest like “Hotels near Disney World” in Google Maps on your laptop. You’ll see several hotel options and their rates, plus the walking and driving distances to your point of interest.


Hotel route previews in Google Maps

Plan your perfect escape this spring with these new tools from Google Flights and Google Hotels.

Two new ways the Google Assistant can help with an upcoming trip

The start of a new year is a great time to de-stress from the holidays and plan vacations for the year. While we can’t promise shorter security lines, extra leg room or a suite with an ocean view, we’re introducing a couple of new features in the Google Assistant to make your travels a little smoother.

Check in for your flight with ease

With your Assistant, you can already search for upcoming flights, get prices and track your flight status, but now we’re taking you one step closer to boarding your plane. You’ll soon be able to check in to your flight, and save and retrieve your boarding pass with the Google Assistant on your Android or iOS smartphone.

If you’re traveling domestically on United Airlines and your flight confirmation is in Gmail, the Assistant will send you a notification on your phone to remind you that check-in is available. You can also say, “Hey Google, check in to my flight” to prompt the Assistant to check in for you, so you don’t need to remember your confirmation number. And after you’ve checked in, you can view your boarding pass in Google Pay or say, “Hey Google, show me my boarding pass.”  

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We’re rolling out this feature first with domestic flights serviced by United Airlines, and we look forward to expanding this feature to more airlines and flights soon.

Sleep easy with hotel bookings from the Assistant

If you have a hotel in mind, the Assistant can help you book a room through a quick conversation on your phone. You could say, “Hey Google, I’d like to book the Cambria Hotel in New York on January 12th” to view availability, different pricing options and then easily reserve a room using your existing Google Pay credentials.

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We’re working with a range of companies to enable fast, simple hotel bookings, from hotels like Choice Hotels, AccorHotels and InterContinental Hotels Group to online travel agencies and partners such as Priceline, Expedia, Mirai and Travelclick - an Amadeus company. This feature is currently available in the U.S. on Android and iOS smartphones and is just the first step in our goal of easing the hotel booking process with the Assistant.

This is a busy time of year, so we hope these new tips with the Google Assistant can help you save time and focus on the most important part of traveling—the journey itself.

For the holidays and beyond, your travel planning guide is here

With the holidays approaching, many of us will travel to see family or go on a vacation. Whether you’re heading out of town over the next few weeks or starting to think about a trip in the new year, we’ve rounded up some of our favorite tools to help make travel just a little bit easier.

Check to make sure your flight is on time

Earlier this year, we started sharing flight delay predictions when you search for your flight status and we’re 85% confident that the flight will eventually be delayed. We use historic flight status data combined with machine learning to make these predictions in advance of airlines confirming delays.

To help with the increase in delayed flights this time of year, the Google Assistant now shows you predicted flight delays, too. You can ask things like, “Hey Google, is my flight on time?” or “Hey Google, what’s the status of the American Airlines flight from Philadelphia to Denver?”

And to make it easier to stay up-to-date on changes to your flight time, over the next few weeks the Assistant will begin proactively notifying you on your phone if we predict a flight delay and tell you the reason if we know it.

Assistant Flight Status

Get the lay of the land with Maps

Traveling to a new destination over the holidays? Google Maps can help when you’re navigating and discovering new places where you live, but it’s also essential when traveling somewhere unfamiliar. We’ve recently added information that is especially useful for travelers exploring a new city. Swipe up on the Explore tab at the bottom of your screen to get ideas of what to do.

Google Maps Travel

Plan your post-holiday vacation

Whether you’re coming off a holiday high or in need of relaxation after all the hustle and bustle, the beginning of the new year is a prime time to think about your next trip. Earlier this year, we unveiled a tool that shows you historic flight price trends, top cities with hotel deals and popular things to do. Now you’ll also see upcoming holiday and school breaks, so you can plan trips around those dates.

If you’re looking for a destination with a good mix of activities for you and the group you’re traveling with, start by searching for “things to do” on Google. In addition to top attractions and relevant articles, you’ll now also see popular experiences for the top destinations worldwide. For example, if you search for “things to do in Nashville” you’ll see things like sporting events, wine tours and hiking in your results. We’ve also recently redesigned things to do to make it easier to filter for your interests, including a new kid-friendly option on phones. You can also now see things to do on a map.


Things to do in Nashville

When you’re ready to start looking at flight prices, Google Flights helps you understand what’s included in your ticket price. You’ll see if prices include a carry-on bag and can filter to see the prices that include carry-on luggage. Now you can also filter to include checked bag fees for domestic flights in the U.S.

Bags filter

Wherever you’re headed during this festive time of year, enjoy your time off and travel safely.

Source: Google LatLong


A new way to browse hotels on Google

Earlier this year, we redesigned our hotel search experience so you can more easily explore and filter for hotels on your mobile device. We see that travelers love interacting with the new mobile features—so beginning today, we’re bringing the same modern look and feel to Hotel Search on desktop, too.

Now, when you search for hotels in Honolulu for example, you can browse hotel results easily with:

  • Photos from the hotel or fellow travelers
  • Hotel information, such as neighborhood and location
  • Hotel reviews from around the web that can be searched by keywords like “air conditioning”

We hope this makes planning your holidays and 2019 travels just a little bit easier.