It’s only July, but Google is looking ahead to the busy ‘Holiday’ shopping season at the end of the year. In a new series of update to search, Google is addressing flight and hotel booking and shopping experience.
Their focus on Hotel and flight pricing includes Smart Filters, Deal labels, Tips and Flight Price tracking. Smart Filters will let you input specific data for a search including searching by ratings or price or more general terms such as ‘Pet-friendly hotels in San Francisco under $200’ and get a result.
Hotel Deals and Tips give you a ‘Deal’ label on a hotel when a hotels pricing is cheaper than it’s historically been or has been discounted from the normal rate. Tips will show when a hotel will be cheaper on a certain date range, if you have freedom to change dates this could save you some money. Google will be rolling this out over the next few months.
Google Flights, their airfare service is getting a boost from Google search, with the ability to opt into flight tracking, with emails and Google Now cards alerting you when pricing on a flight decreases or increases significantly.
There’s hits and misses with timing of availability for us here in Australia, Smart Filters is US-Only for now, but Google says it will hit the rest of the world later this year, while their Hotels and Deals will roll out over the coming months for everyone. Google’s Flight tracking service will roll out to all 26 countries the service operates in – which includes Australia – over the course of the next few weeks.
This looks very useful to me, I travel a lot for work and flight and hotel costs are always in the back of my mind