We wrote this much needed Google Flights Review after the search giant’s acquisition of ITA airline software for the monumental sum of $700 million.
Many websites in the travel industry were worried that the new google flight search engine would be too powerful to compete with and would drive traffic far away from their own travel sites.
So we decided to put it to the test – would our Google flights review reveal that is indeed the best flight search engine online or does it still fall short on various flight routes?
We compared and reviewed Google flights against the best flight aggregators to see the results for some of the most popular US airports to the most visited international destinations…
In other words, we undertook a comparison of the comparison sites, something we like to call meta-meta search.
The results were surprising, to say the least.
Our Google flights review was concerned primarily with price against results produced by Kayak, Skyscanner, Travelgrove, Momondo, Mobissimo, Fly.com, Tripadvisor, Hipmunk & Bing.
Surprisingly, Google flights displayed a more expensive flight than a competitor on almost every occasion.
Google flights fared slightly better on domestic routes but was still outshone on numerous occasions.
The reason for these shortcomings is the fact that Google flights do not include travel agent prices within its listings which can be significantly cheaper than going to the airlines direct.
Unless Google starts to include numerous data sources within their results they will continue to fall short when compared to other aggregators on multiple national and international flight routes.
The Pro's of Google Flight Search
Speed
The pros of Google flight search include its speed which is literally instantaneous. It is beyond doubt the fastest flight search engine available and produces flight results in seconds.
Flexible Calendars
Google flight search has fairly comprehensive calendars showing the best days to fly up to 6 months in advance. They also have a handy price graph where you can quickly get an idea of the best days to fly. As we have mentioned before it is not always the cheapest option but a good hack around this is to use the Google calendar to find good days to fly then use those dates to search other comparison engines.
Destination Discovery
Google flights have a handy map where you can see how much it will cost you to fly to certain destinations and it wil give you inspirational ideas based on your budget, interests and travelling dates. Once again we suggest using this tool to get novel travel ideas and then perform those searches on other sites to be absolutley sure you are getting the best deal.
In these final words of our Google flights review, we are forced to conclude that the search giant does not come up with the best flight offering every time and on every single route.
We are not here to expose Google flights for the sake of it… rather we are here to explain the reality of the search engines in order to help consumers save their hard-earned money.
The best advice we would propose is to check multiple flight aggregators to be sure you are landing the best possible fare.
In fact, this is the very reason we invented our search engine… we wanted to make it easy to compare prices from the best flight aggregators in seconds. So we developed FlightsFinder.com
Simply go to our homepage, enter your travel details once and click the tabs to compare the different flight aggregators side by side.
You can compare prices in seconds from Kayak, Skyscanner, Cheapflights, Momondo, Kiwi, Jetradar and many more.
This, in our experience, is the absolute best way of finding the cheapest fare online.
Give it a try – FlightsFinder.com
Expert Help