How To Utilize Google Flights: A True Powerhouse

Think you already know how to find the cheapest or the best flights? Maybe you use Skyscanner or Kayak or perhaps you even go direct to your choice of airlines, which in some cases is just fine.

Google Flights should be a tool you use alongside your favourites! Why? Google brings together information from different airlines and distribution systems they file these their fares with.

There are just endless tools and filters from pricing, airlines or alliance, bags, flight timings to total duration to find what you specifically want, and it is continually improving year after year. It now has a wealth of historical fare data to also show you what is a good deal and what may not be, right down to when might be the best time to book.

I first wrote this guide back in 2019 but have updated in 2022 and 2024 with new features that were launched, so lets jump in..

What Is Google Flights?

First off, lets get this out the way, Google Flights is not an Online Travel Agent ( OTA ), it is a flight aggregator tool that fetches airfares from Global Distributions Systems ( I’ve worked one such system as a Software Engineer! )- without any specific contracted fares, so you get to see everything under the sun ( well, almost everything ! ).

This means you are not limited to fares that are only available to Expedia or PriceLine but generally all across the board.

How To Utilize Google Flights

The following are the features Google has at it’s disposal to make your flight search as easy and effective as you want to make it!

More Power and Flexibility

Maybe you are an adventurous soul and willing to start a major trip in a city other than your home airport. Google Flights is a powerful search engine with a plethora of options.

Unlike some comparison sites, Google Flights enables you to search multiple destinations from multiple bases, all in one search!

So that way you find the best offer to a range of destinations you might be interested in. In most cases, this does not even matter.

If you are doing a big South East Asia trip or Southern America, that might mean starting your journey in Saigon rather than Bangkok or Buenos Aires rather than Bogota and go the other way.

Lets dive into some examples

Say you are based in London and are travelling to Asia. You may be going to multiple destinations in one trip or just want to explore a select few from a list, but you want to fly in Business so first select that from the third drop down option.

After you select an initial departure city, here we have London Heathrow – LHR (knowing airport codes can make your experience a lot faster!)

You click on the departure field again, but this time, click on the “+” to add the additional cities you will consider flying from. Here I chose Oslo, Stockholm, and Amsterdam, because not only are they convenient cities to position to, but regularly have good business class deals from.

For the destinations, you could choose a few cities as departure cities but great feature is you can put in an entire region! So lets try South East Asia

Now select your dates, and go!

So we now have a map showing the options available and the left hand side showing the cheapest options, in this case seems to be Bangkok.

Clicking through show you the flight options to Bangkok. And even from the get-go, we have an amazing price of £1278 with Finnair.

Check the connections and timing of each and be sure to scroll down as there can be other good alternatives with only marginally higher prices.

In this case we have some Qatar options for £1366, not much of an increase for an enhanced airline product.

Useful Filters

To further refine your flight options, you have more controls at your disposal.

Say you are only interested in Star Alliance carriers. Click on the “Airline” dropdown and you will see that option and now we have star airlines only.

The best recommended flights seems to be more expensive, but wait, if you scroll down..

You can fly Lufthansa business class for £1268! But there’s a catch. This flight has 2 connections and thus the total journey time increases from 10 hours non-stop option from Thai to over 20 hours here.

Thankfully, we have a filter for that! We want to see only flights with 1 stop or less. While we are there, lets choose total journeys under 20 hours.

Again google will show the best flights first, and therefore direct non-stop flights are at top, so lets also put a price limit. Set max price to under £1600

and there we have our options narrowed down..

Our best option looks like Turkish Airlines for £1406 and outward journey is under 16 hours.

Google Flights Best Dates and Price Charts

So far we have not yet tried to find the best departure dates. So lets play with that.

Click on the departure date again.

You are now presented with a calendar view with prices loading up for each date, and you can immediately see if you depart on the 17^th of November instead of 6^th, you save almost £200. Nice!!!

There are similar deals in October too if that suited you better.

So now we see flights departing on 17^th from Stockholm to Bangkok on SWISS for a cool £1258! Bargain!!

Want to know more? Click on the “Prices” option which brings us a nice bar chart showing a view of price fluctuations within a period.

You can see here that’s as good as it gets for this flight.

There’s a grid view too, if you prefer a quick scan of that.

What’s more? How about some useful tips? The “Tips” tab that shows you can fly non-stop on premium economy for £919,

That’s good but not as good as 1258 for return in business for magnitudes more luxury! So we’ll pass.

Once you select outbound and return flights, you can see all your booking options. Including options to bookmark and share with friends.

Google Flights Now Shows THE Cheapest Fare

Since 2024, Google Flights now also shows you the Cheapest fare tab, in other words the absolute best / lowest fare available for your “main” search parameters..

It does then highlight what the trade-offs might be, be it a worse timing, an extra connection or perhaps a different airport in the same city!

In most cases you may just opt for options under the default “Best fare tab” but if you are price open to saving more money than what you may have already specified on your search limits

Google Flights Tracking & Historical Data Signals

When you click through on a fare, Google shows you a colour chart indicator from Green – low, Orange – about average to Red – high

So with a quick glance, you already have a tool that is taking into account vast historical fare information to help you make a decision on booking..

After all this helpfulness, what if you were still unsure? Perhaps you have the total flexibility time/ hoping prices would drop even more? Or just need more time to hash out details.

Well if you sign into your Google Account (if you aren’t already) you will see a flight tracking option.

Simply click on the tracking toggle and you are set. You will now be alerted by google on any prices changes for this itinerary. Brilliant huh?

Google Flights Connections Filter

If there were some particular places where you wanted to go via, this is your tool. This feature essentially lets you build multiple trips in 1. And remember any connections under 24 hours does not count as a stopover, so you should still get the best price if there are flights available on a particular fare code.

Other fares have a very reasonable surcharge added on.

Select “Brussels” in the above example, and you have

well that’s understandable as I have already filtered by some very specific criteria, namely the Alliance and price range. You can un-select any filters simply by clicking on the “X” of the option.

Alas, I would use and apply this much earlier on in the search process.

Google Flights Search Anywhere Tool

A feature that was initially missing from Google Flights and one I believe Skyscanner first introduced, is the ability to search for flights without a specific destination in mind!

Also referred to as Google Flights Explore this tool now provides you just that and more. There are two ways to make use of this feature, either on the default screen and typing “Anywhere” in the destination tab..

You can also just click on the Explore Tab at the top to take you straight to the tool..

• By default this will show you flights departing in the next 6 months on a map view.
• I’ve found the tool can sometimes fixed on specific area like Europe but you can just move the map /pan / zoom out as needed !
• If you wish you can select specific “Months” to narrow your search and then drill down to specific dates after.
• You can also use filter to show 1 week or 2 week trips etc
• Once you find something you like, when you click through it then reverts to a regular search where you will see the airlines, dates and different pricing

Overall Thoughts

I hope you enjoyed this guide and find it as useful. I could easily write several posts going into more specifics of different features available through Google Flights.  However the above cover a good highlight of it’s capabilities and how you can use it to find the best flights for your needs – it’s something I’ve used to find great flight deals over the years.

While it started out as a very easy to use / simple interface, Google has added so much more features over the years, it can feel a little too much for a complete beginner, but with some time, you will become at ease with the tool! I am particularly glad they have introduced the Google flights search anywhere as I no longer have to use Skyscanner for that