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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.