6 ms·

Say what you want about Google/Alphabet as a whole, but Google Flights is incredible. It's absolutely amazing how quickly and largely that Google crushed all it

Say what you want about Google/Alphabet as a whole, but Google Flights is incredible. It's absolutely amazing how quickly and largely that Google crushed all its competitors in terms of usability. Kayak, Hipmunk, Orbitz, Skyscanner were all my go-to's at one point but G.Flights is far superior in so many ways. It actually remembers your airline preference between searches. You don't have to beg or change settings to see a few days before or after... every search has a date grid and long-term graph, both which respond almost immediately to additional changes to date ranges. Searching multiple airports or destinations is super easy. Plus the calendar view, with lowest price for every day -- sure other sites have it but only for unfiltered searches. Google's calendar view is updated with every filter change. There was a time in the 90s when eAAsySabre was publicly available to anyone, and text based searches were simple and fast and so easy. But Google Flights is even better, IMO. Pretty amazing that sites entirely dependent on travel search seem satisfied with 10-year old UI while Google showed how much better it could be.

the_reformation 7y ago
The UI is so smooth that I visit almost daily and just punch in cities to see what itineraries come up. I just moved to New York and I'm having a blast seeing all the new nonstop destinations I have.
devIO 7y ago
I used to think it was great but it’s no different than an Expedia, which is what my wife uses. Earlier this week Google had fewer flights than Expedia.
guiambros 7y ago
(disclaimer: I work at Google, but no relationship with the Flights team other than as an individual user) Funny story: just last week I was booking a complicated multi-city trip with 5 legs, multiple countries, etc. I tried several times via united.com, and it wasn't showing me any flights available in one of the legs (which I knew they had a codeshare agreement). I went back to Google Flights, chose all my flights, selected "Book with United", and was able to finish the reservation on united.com (!), with all the flights properly populated, including codeshares. It's remarkable that the integration between Google Flights and the airlines is better than even the airlines' websites themselves.
- chime 7y ago
  I’m not too surprised by this. The function of every form, wizard, walk-thru, or guided app is to end up with a blob of data to post to the backend. While the blob could be relatively simple, e.g. iCal for recurring event, the UI can be extremely complicated because every valid combination must be achievable but all invalid combinations must be blocked. Google Flights UI is better than United at coming up with the right data blob to post. Once the blob is created, United final page and backend have no problem parsing and posting it.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  Sounds like a P/NP-type problem. It's quite a hard problem to calculate all possible permutations of routings and schedules across 5 cities ("NP"), and United's system clearly isn't up to snuff for it, while Google's is. But validating and pricing any single itinerary is a trivially easy problem ("P"), so United can handle that no problem. It can't come up with the itinerary, but given a particular one, it will sell it to you.
  - guiambros 7y ago
    On multi-city trips, usually the UI allows the user to select each leg individually, so it is a very trivial problem (i.e., the same as 5 one way trips). So no, there's no special magic here.
- danielscrubs 7y ago
  I found out that Google Flights just have smaller time margins between flights. Might be something to look out for.
aclimatt 7y ago
I agree that its real-time inventory and pricing availability has been a total game changer in the UX department. Presumably their acquisition of ITA gave them the ability to respond to queries in real-time which enabled all of the (quite excellent) features you pointed out above. There's just one problem -- because a ton of the data is cached, or precomputed, or however it's done, a substantial and frustrating amount of the data is simply wrong. As in, an unbookable flight. I spend probably an unreasonable amount of time searching for flights, and anecdotally I'd say about 5-10% of the results I get (not even for complex itineraries) either have a completely incorrect price, or are wholly unbookable on any website. Calling the airline doesn't count, because if their website doesn't have it, 99% chance neither will the call center. For example, one from a few hours ago: https://www.google.com/flights/?f=0#f=0&flt=/m/01lfy./m/02_286.2019-08-14.CPHMAN0SK539~MANJFK0VS127;c:USD;e:1;sd:1;t:b;tt:o;sp:2.USD.40325 https://www.google.com/flights/?f=0#f=0&flt=/m/01lfy./m/02_2...
- CardenB 7y ago
  This is actually very difficult. The data has to be sourced from somewhere, which would be the airlines. The airlines have fragile backends that cannot handle much load. As a result, Google has to be very selective in their query volume, so they try to cache intelligently. The result is that sometimes the information they display can be out of sync with airlines. You should notice this issue more on rarer flight routes.
  - purple_ducks 7y ago
    > The data has to be sourced from somewhere, which would be the airlines. Such nonsense. Pretty much all airlines don't own/run the source of truth for their flights and haven't for decades. They outsource that to GDS[1] such as Sabre and Amadeus. Their backends are not fragile. You just have to pay for every query thus the caching. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_distribution_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_distribution_system
- jgalt212 7y ago
  > Presumably their acquisition of ITA gave them the ability to respond to queries in real-time which enabled all of the (quite excellent) features you pointed out above. Perhaps, but I was never impressed with Orbitz during its heyday. I remember watching a Google tech talk* about how hard a problem it is to give the searcher a viable set of options to chose from. However, in my experience, the viable set of options always seemed to include a 23 hr layover with with multiple connections that was $200 cheaper than the nonstop option, and various single connection 1hr layover options about $150 cheaper than nonstop. At the time, both Expedia and Travelocity offered a more reasonable set of options. * can't seem to find it right now. Will post if able to locate later.
s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
Ditto. GFlights is the best flight planner, especially if you're flexible and want the cheapest day to fly in/out.
scrollaway 7y ago
I love Google Flights as well, though I wish they had something like Kayak Trips. My understanding is they kind of do have that with automatic flight booking scanning in gmail, but it's impossible to add information manually in there. A lot of stuff is missing for me at least.
dastx 7y ago
> Google Flights is incredible. It's absolutely amazing how quickly and largely that Google crushed all its competitors in terms of usability. Really? I've yet to see a flight be cheaper or close to what the likes of Kayak and Skyscanner have provided.
- wildrhythms 7y ago
  I'm always curious about where these sites source their prices from. Do the airlines provide a backend with real-time prices? Are they scraped from the frontend? Do these sites sell at a loss sometimes in "guaranteeing" a lower price?
  - dastx 7y ago
    I've known of a service that actually provides APIs. I cannot remember what it is called but such services exist for hotels and holidays too. Iirc I stumbled upon one of the flight tracking services by pure chance. Having said that, I feel like Skyscanner at the very least has their own systems in place. There have been times where I've chosen a ticket, have gone through to the website that sells the ticket at the price, and just before it goes through, Skyscanner validates that the price still exists, and then bails saying the price has increased or decreased. Usually it's not by a lot, but it has happened.
- ulfw 7y ago
  You are right. In fact Google flights is regularly missing some airlines. Also the flights I found are often great on Google but then not available when actually trying to book, making the site quite a bit useless. What sets it apart is the UI and fast search. But I guess with fast searching (caching) comes inaccurate results. It’s a thin line.
jboydyhacker 7y ago
It's actually not that amazing- they bought out ITA Matrix and just iterated on top of it.
- stefco_ 7y ago
  They added the last important missing feature from ITAMatrix, which was a direct link to a prefilled checkout page. That part is nice.
  - H8crilA 7y ago
    Also speed, it is much faster. But it has all started with the purchase of the main route planning software (ITA), essentially a purchase of a monopoly.
grecy 7y ago
It's funny, I've had exactly the opposite experience. Multiple times flying from random places in Africa to Australia return, and Australia to Canada, GFlights was at least $1k more than the cheapest on kayak or orbitz. Maybe GFlights just doesn't show overly cheap options..?
- pb7 7y ago
  Google Flights won’t show all OTA options, primarily the ones with unreliable reputations. SkyScanner, for example, will scrape the bottom of the barrel to find options to save that final couple of bucks (which is perfectly fine) but if you have problems with the ticketing post-booking, you will wish you didn’t go that route.
gomox 7y ago
I routinely find both better routes and prices using Kayak, and it has far more powerful filtering. Mostly intercontinental flights though. I wouldn't be surprised if Google is better tuned to US domestic flights.
telltruth 7y ago
This has now become a pattern. Google throws resources on some execs whims, kills off competitors and after a while exec cashes out, thanks to their rewards system. The left over bunch then figures out that the thing is not as profitable so they must either kill off their own product or let it stagnate into oblivion. Customers now are left with dead bodies and long recovery period before investor fears wears off and replacements arrives. This scorched earth approach has left too many areas without good products, growth and investments. Google Flights is destined to be on chopping block sooner or later. It has not much influence on core business and is not going to be wildly profitable. The problem is that by the time Google kills it, Kayak and other competitors would be forced in to unrecoverable comma or just outright killed off as well.
- listenallyall 7y ago
  Was your last sentence written with the recognition that Kayak's parent company Booking Holdings (formerly Priceline) has an 80 billion market cap, and made 5.3 billion in operating profit last year? True, Google is 10x larger but Kayak has significant resources to compete.
tinyhouse 7y ago
I actually find Google Flights pretty confusing. Haven't tried it recently though. Kayak works pretty well for me and I usually go to the airline's website to book directly when I find a good deal. If the price is the same I book via the airline website. For domestic flights I also check southwest.com since they don't work with Kayak and other travel sites. Don't be surprised that many other travel sites cannot compete. After all, most of the sites are owned by either Expedia or Priceline. They are not startups. Also, they focus more on hotels since that's where the money is.
- listenallyall 7y ago
  ...and Google's hotel search is starting to supersede the legacy sites in ease of use and speed, just like Flights has.
sytelus 7y ago
One of the good test case for any flight booking website is Bhutan. Kayak seems to do good job while G Flights says nothing available. Also later doesn’t seem to allow flexible dates, a critical feature if you ask me.
adamsvystun 7y ago
Have you tried Kiwi.com? I think they are still superior in some aspects of UI/UX than the competition. They allow you for example to select a range of dates for your departure/arrival instead of single date. They also give you ability to choose multiple departure/arrival points. And these points can be cities, regions or countries. I have not seen other websites that give you that kind of flexibility.
- gokhan 7y ago
  Another vote for Kiwi. Using circles for to search in multiple departure locations is currently unmatched.
HashThis 7y ago
Google Flights is amazing, because... Expedia bought up everything else. (Kayak, Orbitz, TripAdvisor, etc.) I've had Expedia do horrible things to me so I'm dedicated to use an alternative. It is needed to have Google Flights be a great competitor.
- dbsmith83 7y ago
  Expedia does not own Kayak or TripAdvisor. There is actually a lot of competition in the space. Last thing anyone needs is Google or Amazon stepping into yet another market.
  - krn 7y ago
    > There is actually a lot of competition in the space. Is there? Expedia Group owns: Expedia, Ebookers, Orbitz, and Travelocity. Booking Holdings owns: Priceline, Agoda, Kayak, Momondo, and Cheapflights. Ctrip Group owns: Trip.com, and SkyScanner.

the_reformation 7y ago

The UI is so smooth that I visit almost daily and just punch in cities to see what itineraries come up. I just moved to New York and I'm having a blast seeing all the new nonstop destinations I have.

devIO 7y ago

I used to think it was great but it’s no different than an Expedia, which is what my wife uses. Earlier this week Google had fewer flights than Expedia.

guiambros 7y ago

(disclaimer: I work at Google, but no relationship with the Flights team other than as an individual user) Funny story: just last week I was booking a complicated multi-city trip with 5 legs, multiple countries, etc. I tried several times via united.com, and it wasn't showing me any flights available in one of the legs (which I knew they had a codeshare agreement). I went back to Google Flights, chose all my flights, selected "Book with United", and was able to finish the reservation on united.com (!), with all the flights properly populated, including codeshares. It's remarkable that the integration between Google Flights and the airlines is better than even the airlines' websites themselves.

chime 7y ago
I’m not too surprised by this. The function of every form, wizard, walk-thru, or guided app is to end up with a blob of data to post to the backend. While the blob could be relatively simple, e.g. iCal for recurring event, the UI can be extremely complicated because every valid combination must be achievable but all invalid combinations must be blocked. Google Flights UI is better than United at coming up with the right data blob to post. Once the blob is created, United final page and backend have no problem parsing and posting it.
CydeWeys 7y ago
Sounds like a P/NP-type problem. It's quite a hard problem to calculate all possible permutations of routings and schedules across 5 cities ("NP"), and United's system clearly isn't up to snuff for it, while Google's is. But validating and pricing any single itinerary is a trivially easy problem ("P"), so United can handle that no problem. It can't come up with the itinerary, but given a particular one, it will sell it to you.
- guiambros 7y ago
  On multi-city trips, usually the UI allows the user to select each leg individually, so it is a very trivial problem (i.e., the same as 5 one way trips). So no, there's no special magic here.
danielscrubs 7y ago
I found out that Google Flights just have smaller time margins between flights. Might be something to look out for.

aclimatt 7y ago

I agree that its real-time inventory and pricing availability has been a total game changer in the UX department. Presumably their acquisition of ITA gave them the ability to respond to queries in real-time which enabled all of the (quite excellent) features you pointed out above. There's just one problem -- because a ton of the data is cached, or precomputed, or however it's done, a substantial and frustrating amount of the data is simply wrong. As in, an unbookable flight. I spend probably an unreasonable amount of time searching for flights, and anecdotally I'd say about 5-10% of the results I get (not even for complex itineraries) either have a completely incorrect price, or are wholly unbookable on any website. Calling the airline doesn't count, because if their website doesn't have it, 99% chance neither will the call center. For example, one from a few hours ago: https://www.google.com/flights/?f=0#f=0&flt=/m/01lfy./m/02_286.2019-08-14.CPHMAN0SK539~MANJFK0VS127;c:USD;e:1;sd:1;t:b;tt:o;sp:2.USD.40325 https://www.google.com/flights/?f=0#f=0&flt=/m/01lfy./m/02_2...

CardenB 7y ago
This is actually very difficult. The data has to be sourced from somewhere, which would be the airlines. The airlines have fragile backends that cannot handle much load. As a result, Google has to be very selective in their query volume, so they try to cache intelligently. The result is that sometimes the information they display can be out of sync with airlines. You should notice this issue more on rarer flight routes.
- purple_ducks 7y ago
  > The data has to be sourced from somewhere, which would be the airlines. Such nonsense. Pretty much all airlines don't own/run the source of truth for their flights and haven't for decades. They outsource that to GDS[1] such as Sabre and Amadeus. Their backends are not fragile. You just have to pay for every query thus the caching. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_distribution_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_distribution_system
jgalt212 7y ago
> Presumably their acquisition of ITA gave them the ability to respond to queries in real-time which enabled all of the (quite excellent) features you pointed out above. Perhaps, but I was never impressed with Orbitz during its heyday. I remember watching a Google tech talk* about how hard a problem it is to give the searcher a viable set of options to chose from. However, in my experience, the viable set of options always seemed to include a 23 hr layover with with multiple connections that was $200 cheaper than the nonstop option, and various single connection 1hr layover options about $150 cheaper than nonstop. At the time, both Expedia and Travelocity offered a more reasonable set of options. * can't seem to find it right now. Will post if able to locate later.

s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago

Ditto. GFlights is the best flight planner, especially if you're flexible and want the cheapest day to fly in/out.

scrollaway 7y ago

I love Google Flights as well, though I wish they had something like Kayak Trips. My understanding is they kind of do have that with automatic flight booking scanning in gmail, but it's impossible to add information manually in there. A lot of stuff is missing for me at least.

dastx 7y ago

> Google Flights is incredible. It's absolutely amazing how quickly and largely that Google crushed all its competitors in terms of usability. Really? I've yet to see a flight be cheaper or close to what the likes of Kayak and Skyscanner have provided.

wildrhythms 7y ago
I'm always curious about where these sites source their prices from. Do the airlines provide a backend with real-time prices? Are they scraped from the frontend? Do these sites sell at a loss sometimes in "guaranteeing" a lower price?
- dastx 7y ago
  I've known of a service that actually provides APIs. I cannot remember what it is called but such services exist for hotels and holidays too. Iirc I stumbled upon one of the flight tracking services by pure chance. Having said that, I feel like Skyscanner at the very least has their own systems in place. There have been times where I've chosen a ticket, have gone through to the website that sells the ticket at the price, and just before it goes through, Skyscanner validates that the price still exists, and then bails saying the price has increased or decreased. Usually it's not by a lot, but it has happened.
ulfw 7y ago
You are right. In fact Google flights is regularly missing some airlines. Also the flights I found are often great on Google but then not available when actually trying to book, making the site quite a bit useless. What sets it apart is the UI and fast search. But I guess with fast searching (caching) comes inaccurate results. It’s a thin line.

jboydyhacker 7y ago

It's actually not that amazing- they bought out ITA Matrix and just iterated on top of it.

stefco_ 7y ago
They added the last important missing feature from ITAMatrix, which was a direct link to a prefilled checkout page. That part is nice.
- H8crilA 7y ago
  Also speed, it is much faster. But it has all started with the purchase of the main route planning software (ITA), essentially a purchase of a monopoly.

grecy 7y ago

It's funny, I've had exactly the opposite experience. Multiple times flying from random places in Africa to Australia return, and Australia to Canada, GFlights was at least $1k more than the cheapest on kayak or orbitz. Maybe GFlights just doesn't show overly cheap options..?

pb7 7y ago
Google Flights won’t show all OTA options, primarily the ones with unreliable reputations. SkyScanner, for example, will scrape the bottom of the barrel to find options to save that final couple of bucks (which is perfectly fine) but if you have problems with the ticketing post-booking, you will wish you didn’t go that route.

gomox 7y ago

I routinely find both better routes and prices using Kayak, and it has far more powerful filtering. Mostly intercontinental flights though. I wouldn't be surprised if Google is better tuned to US domestic flights.

telltruth 7y ago

This has now become a pattern. Google throws resources on some execs whims, kills off competitors and after a while exec cashes out, thanks to their rewards system. The left over bunch then figures out that the thing is not as profitable so they must either kill off their own product or let it stagnate into oblivion. Customers now are left with dead bodies and long recovery period before investor fears wears off and replacements arrives. This scorched earth approach has left too many areas without good products, growth and investments. Google Flights is destined to be on chopping block sooner or later. It has not much influence on core business and is not going to be wildly profitable. The problem is that by the time Google kills it, Kayak and other competitors would be forced in to unrecoverable comma or just outright killed off as well.

listenallyall 7y ago
Was your last sentence written with the recognition that Kayak's parent company Booking Holdings (formerly Priceline) has an 80 billion market cap, and made 5.3 billion in operating profit last year? True, Google is 10x larger but Kayak has significant resources to compete.

tinyhouse 7y ago

I actually find Google Flights pretty confusing. Haven't tried it recently though. Kayak works pretty well for me and I usually go to the airline's website to book directly when I find a good deal. If the price is the same I book via the airline website. For domestic flights I also check southwest.com since they don't work with Kayak and other travel sites. Don't be surprised that many other travel sites cannot compete. After all, most of the sites are owned by either Expedia or Priceline. They are not startups. Also, they focus more on hotels since that's where the money is.

listenallyall 7y ago
...and Google's hotel search is starting to supersede the legacy sites in ease of use and speed, just like Flights has.

sytelus 7y ago

One of the good test case for any flight booking website is Bhutan. Kayak seems to do good job while G Flights says nothing available. Also later doesn’t seem to allow flexible dates, a critical feature if you ask me.

adamsvystun 7y ago

Have you tried Kiwi.com? I think they are still superior in some aspects of UI/UX than the competition. They allow you for example to select a range of dates for your departure/arrival instead of single date. They also give you ability to choose multiple departure/arrival points. And these points can be cities, regions or countries. I have not seen other websites that give you that kind of flexibility.

gokhan 7y ago
Another vote for Kiwi. Using circles for to search in multiple departure locations is currently unmatched.

HashThis 7y ago

Google Flights is amazing, because... Expedia bought up everything else. (Kayak, Orbitz, TripAdvisor, etc.) I've had Expedia do horrible things to me so I'm dedicated to use an alternative. It is needed to have Google Flights be a great competitor.

dbsmith83 7y ago
Expedia does not own Kayak or TripAdvisor. There is actually a lot of competition in the space. Last thing anyone needs is Google or Amazon stepping into yet another market.
- krn 7y ago
  > There is actually a lot of competition in the space. Is there? Expedia Group owns: Expedia, Ebookers, Orbitz, and Travelocity. Booking Holdings owns: Priceline, Agoda, Kayak, Momondo, and Cheapflights. Ctrip Group owns: Trip.com, and SkyScanner.