Google Flights is well known and popular. But what many do not know: the search giant Google even owns what is probably the most powerful flight search engine in the world. This is how you can use the professional flight search.
Google Flights: Flights at the best price
The Google Flights web app offers everything you could want from a flight search engine and more: a clear overview, tips for alternative airports, easy operation, price monitoring, a helpful price chart by departure days and much more.
Thanks to many filters, you can also refine the search as you wish. The number of stops, a maximum price, departure time, airline and more are available as criteria.
If you found a flight with Google Flights, you will be redirected to the airline with one click. This saves you annoying intermediary fees and always gives you the best price.
Google’s professional search engine
However, Google Flights is by no means the most powerful Google tool for researching cheap airfares. Even more powerful is the Google Matrix Airfare Search – ITA Software, the search engine behind Google Flights. The tool is offered ad-free and completely free of charge. In this way you are even competing with travel agencies.
The English-language search engine is specially designed to find the cheapest airfare. The app allows access to the metadata of most airlines and offers countless filter and setting options to find the perfect flight for you.
The specialty for Google’s professional search engine are complex multi-stop and multi-joint flights where other travel search engines fail. With so-called advanced routing codes, you can specify in detail how you want your flight to be. The Google Matrix ITA software then spits out all flight options sorted by price. Interesting to see: Because Google breaks down the prices in detail, you can see exactly the amount of flight taxes or security fees incurred. It is often precisely these additional costs that drive up the airfare.
Cool: The Google tool offers the “Price per miles” view especially for frequent flyers. It’s worth taking a look here if you have accumulated miles with the airlines and want help deciding whether it’s worth redeeming for this flight or whether you’d rather top up your mileage account even further.
Another insider tip is a look at the “Time Bars” on offer. There you can see all the flights found for your search query, clearly listed with color codes. Thanks to the view, a glance is enough to find out the flights with the optimal flight time or to identify unnaturally long or too short stopovers. If you travel without time constraints, you might even look for offers with long stays. You can then use this to explore foreign cities or to meet up with friends for dinner.
