Here’s why Google Flights should be the first stop in your airfare search.
If you’re booking a flight with cash, Google Flights should be the very first website you visit. Not Expedia. Not the airline’s own site. Google Flights. It lets you compare fares across months of dates, track price changes, and customize your search in ways no airline website or online travel agency can match.
One important thing to know: Google Flights is an aggregator, not a booking engine. When you find the fare you want, it’ll link you to the airline’s website or an OTA to complete the purchase. In almost every case, book directly with the airline—it’ll make your life much easier if anything changes down the road.
What makes Google Flights so good? Start with the pricing calendar. The moment you run a search, you’ll see fares for two months at a time. You can scan an entire year of pricing in a given market in under a minute. The results default to “best flights” based on price, convenience, and overall value, and each option shows you a surprising amount of detail: whether a fare includes a carry-on, seat pitch, Wi-Fi availability, in-seat power, even the type of business class seat on long-haul flights. (For example, Google Flights will distinguish a Cathay Pacific flight with the new Aria Suite from one without it.)
The filters are where it really shines. You can sort by number of stops, specific airlines or alliances, whether bags are included, price range, flight times, connecting airports, duration, and cabin type—including the option to exclude basic economy fares. And here’s the key: those filters apply to the pricing calendar, too. So if you want to find the cheapest nonstop flight on a particular airline at a specific time of day across the entire year, you can do that in seconds.
Google Flights also flags whether a fare is typical, cheap, or expensive based on historical data. Take that with a grain of salt—airline pricing has a million variables—but it’s a useful gut check.
Don’t know where you want to go? Google Flights handles that, too. You can search from a specific origin to an entire country or continent and get a map showing all your options with prices. Or if you’re flexible on your departure city, you can enter multiple origin and destination airports to compare.
One of my favorite features is price tracking. Click the “Track prices” button on any flight or route, and Google will email you when the price changes. This is invaluable in two scenarios: when you’re waiting for a fare to drop before booking, and when you’ve already booked on an airline with no change fees and want to reprice your ticket for a voucher. You can track as many flights as you want, and there’s a dashboard tied to your Google account that shows historical price changes.
Twist’s Take: Google Flights is the Swiss Army knife of airfare shopping—use it to compare prices, filter obsessively, and track fares over time.