Here’s How Google Is Helping You Travel for Less This Holiday Season

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Do you plan to pay for your flights (gasp) this holiday season?  If so, Google’s new tool can help you book the cheapest flight.

Google has compiled historical data from the 25 most frequented routes last Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year.  They use this data to help you understand which days are generally the cheapest to book.  Just pick your origin and destination, choose the dates you plan to travel, and you’ll see a chart of 2017 prices on specific days.

For example, if you want to fly from New York to London on November 22 and return on November 28, you’ll get a chart of the prices up to 165 days prior to Thanksgiving.

Nobody’s promising the trends will be identical this year, but it’s still a handy tool.

Available origin cities are:

• Chicago
• Los Angeles
• New York
• San Francisco
• Washington

And depending on your route, destination cities include:

• Atlanta
• Chicago
• Honolulu
• Las Vegas
• Los Angeles
• London
• Miami
• New York
• Orlando
• San Francisco

Available departure dates are between November 19 and November 23, 2018.  And return dates are between November 25 and November 28, 2018.

You can also see which cities usually offer discount hotel stays.

New Feature for Mobile Devices

If you’re searching Google Flights on your phone, you’ll be shown a graph below your search results indicating whether the prices you’ve found are historically reasonable.  This feature isn’t restricted to certain cities.  So it’s helpful for anyone in the US traveling for Thanksgiving.

Identify Good Deals All Year Long

If you’re interested in traveling for the holidays later in 2019 (or any time at all, really), you can use the new Google Maps feature under the Explore Map section.  It gives you the ability to search flights for:

• Whole months
• A weekend
• 1-week trip
• 2-week trip

Just type in your origin airport, and the cheapest destinations will pop up!  You can search whole continents at a time like this.  And the results on the side of the page will indicate if you’re getting a better deal than usual.  Very cool!

Bottom Line

Google Maps is making extra effort to help you find cheap travel for the holidays.  And every other day, for that matter.  Let us know if these tools have helped you out!  And if you’d rather just book your flights for (practically) free, check out our favorite travel cards and we’ll show you how easy it can be.

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