How to use Google Flights to find cheap flights?

 

Google makes everything easy. In this post, we will show you how to use the google flight’s powerful visual analytic search option to find cheap flights quickly and easily.

 

We hope that you will use this powerful feature to find cheaper flights this holiday season! Save on holiday travel and thank us by letting your friends know about our site. 🙂

 

First go to google flights search tool by typing the following address on your favorite browser (like Chrome)

www.google.com/flights

 

Step 1. Fill in departure and arrival cities for your flight travel.

 

Once you are on the Google flight search page, you get the following screen. Very simple and intuitive to use. Type in the departure and landing cities, soon as you finish the destination city, Google will automatically give range of flights and price for (default) dates.

 

Round trip is the default choice, but you can select one-way or multi-city options as well.

 

Google Flights

Google Flights


Step 2. Use the power of Google Flights to find cheaper flights

 

Choose your dates and then click on bar graph sign below the to date. Bar graph launches the powerful visual analytic tool that compares pricing for the start and end points of your travel by plotting rates in a graph so you can visually check high and low points based on dates. see below.

Google price analytic tool for flight comparison

As you can see from the picture above, the graphical analytical tool makes it easy to quick spot low fares. You can do a few other things to further narrow down the choices.
Google’s powerful tool, as shown above, allows you to do many types of what-if analysis to quickly narrow down your choices.

 

  • Change number of days of the trip and see if that changes pricing.
  • You can go forward or backward (if dates allow), on the dates – above example, move forward to November and beyond – and see if that lowers your price per ticket
  • Stops: Adjust the number of stops and see if that drops or increase the pricing
  • Price: Provide a price range and see if that puts you in a different time frame for the flight
  • Airline: Choose a specific airline, may be you have a airline miles that you want to use – see if you can narrow prices or timeline based on that
  • Times: You might want to leave on a specific window of time – for example, you need to leave after tennis match, you can pick the time slot and see option

Step 3: Use Maps option to find lower fare near your departure or arrival city

 

Click on the map you are here icon next to the bar graph icon, and you will see a map like shown below with nearest airports to your departure or arrival with fares highlighted next to city names on the map.

 

You can also move the pointer from one city name to another city name and see all other dynamics of the flight search change, such as price, availability etc.

Maps option


Step 4: Other alternative options to narrow your fare search

 

Check out these options as illustrated above, to further narrow down the choices.

 

nearest cities and flight fare

 

 

Timeline based search

 

Below video, from Google flights team shows a quick summary of these features.

 

 

Hope this article provided you insight on how to use Google flights to find cheap flight. Let us know if you have used other tools to find cheap flights.

 

Enjoy and Happy flying.

– Sally

 

Sally McFly

Sally is a self made blogger, and passionate about travel and finding deals. More importantly, she loves to share her deal finding techniques with others. From working as a travel agent and then running her own business, she has over 2 decades experience in travel industry. She is an avid reader, and a loving mom. You can follow Sally on google plus at : Google+

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1 Response

  1. January 28, 2014

    […] How to use Google Flights to find cheap flights? […]

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