Google Flights Explore Review

Now have the power to do open ended search for flights based on regions

You’ve probably heard or seen that Google has gotten into the flight search game.  What you didn’t know is they have an awesome cool new feature called Explore that’s kind of a hidden feature for now (one of many Google secret projects).  Read a bit more to find out what it’s for and what it does.  This is some pretty exciting stuff that I just couldn’t hold to myself!  Google Flights Explore is an awesome tool!

So let’s set the stage:

• You’re starting to do some trip planning.
• You kind of have an idea of when you’d want to go and how many vacation days you want to take but you’re at a stage where you’re still pretty flexible with dates.
• First thing you usually start thinking about is flights.
• Okay great…you pop open Kayak and/or Hipmunk + whatever else you fancy and maybe with even Google Maps open you pick a few places you could do a round trip on and guesstimate some days.
• Whether you can narrow down the place or dates down it doesn’t matter because before you know it, you probably have 20 tabs open searching tons of combinations and permutations for dates/locations that can give you the cheapest price.
• You’re probably thinking to yourself.  “There’s got to be a better way to do this.”

Introducing Google Flights – Explore:

• SkyScanner is a site that has a neat concept of being able to pick “Everywhere” in the TO: field of the search and for a long time it was the only one that offered it.  
• Google has now made it possible to do the following:
  • From one particular location you can chose a destination that isn’t specific to a city or airport.
  • You can now search:  YYZ -> United States or YYZ -> Europe or YYZ -> South East Asia.
  • You get this awesome day by day bar graph breakdown with the lowest price highlighted and average price in the form of a dotted line.
  • It’s seriously so dead easy to use.
  • What’s more is that you can further filter the data by # of connections, alliances, duration, outbound time and return time.
• Limitations:
  • The consolidated groupings like “United States”, “Europe” or “South East Asia” are limited to what Google has programmed so far and you can only search for trip lengths from 0-14 days.
  • You are also limited to whatever OTA or supplies/carriers Google has connected to so far so there may still be a low cost carrier that isn’t on there so you still have to be a bit smart about it.
• What I love about this is the possibilities of this down the road once Google has a more complete listing of airlines.
• Instead of opening all those tabs, you can almost do it with one click of a button using Google Flights – Explore.

Screenshots of What’s Happening:

Final thoughts

Now go forth with this new knowledge and travel!

Find Google Flights Explore here.