- Hi and welcome to the channel.
If you're new here, my name is Megan,
and on this channel, you'll find weekly videos
somehow related to travel.
In today's video,
we'll be talking about how to effectively search on Google Flights,
including filters and features
as well as answering common questions like if taxes are included in the price
or how to change the currency.
There's a lot of talk about using this time now to plan your next adventure
and about the incredible travel deals to come whenever travel opens up again.
However, these deals are no good to us
if we don't know where or how to search for them.
Tuning in for the next 10 minutes
could end up saving you hundreds on your next adventure
and prepare you to snag the very best travel deals in the coming months.
(music)
Start by opening up Google Flights in your browser.
This is going to be a basic overview,
perfect for someone that is new to Google Flights
or that is new to searching and booking travel online altogether.
I'll go through all the features and filters that make Google Flights
the most powerful tool for finding cheap flights.
Once you have Google Flights open, scroll all the way to the bottom
and just check that the language, country and currency is correct;
I have Canadian, but for the purposes of this video, I will be using USD.
A basic flight search is going to consist of your departure,
your destination, your dates,
your trip type, the passenger count, and then the fare class.
When it comes to your departure, and then also your destination,
you can put in an entire city, an airport,
a country, or even a whole region.
Something that I particularly love about Google Flights
is that you can actually search multiple locations,
so you can search up to six different departure and six different arrival city.
So, by doing that, you just add another one,
type in anywhere else you may want to go...
This is great if you're between multiple destinations
and you haven't decided and want to see what the best flights are,
and also great if you happen to live near multiple airports,
so in my case, I would put Ottawa
but I would also consider flights out of Montreal
depending on what was going to be the best deal.
Now when you search,
Google Flights is going to search every single combination
between Ottawa-Bangkok, Ottawa-Hanoi,
Montreal-Bangkok, Montreal-Hanoi, and so on,
to find you the best price,
and then it's going to give you the suggested flights
listed in order of preference here.
And then, just so you know, the price that you're seeing,
this USD 741,
is going to be the total price for the entire trip,
so from your home to your destination,
back to your home again, with all of the taxes included.
The price that you see is the price that you will pay.
To keep this simple, I'm going to leave the search in just Ottawa to Bangkok.
I want to show you that as we go through and we change these different features,
it's going to be updating the price automatically,
as you can see it already is here.
Next you can look at the type of trip.
Round trip, which is from your home,
to your destination, back to your home again,
is typically going to be the cheapest way to book.
You can also look at doing a one-way flight,
which is quite self-explanatory,
and then also a multi-city.
Multi-city is great if you want to go away and then explore multiple locations,
so you may go Ottawa to Bangkok, Bangkok to Hanoi,
and then add a flight that's going to take you from Hanoi back home again.
By booking a flight like this,
you may think it's going to be more expensive, but it's often not.
It's usually cheaper to book multi-city
than it is to book multiple one-way flights.
As I mentioned before,
a simple round trip is probably going to get you the best deal.
Then you also want to look at passenger count;
if you are traveling as more than one person,
definitely input it now.
It would suck if you searched for a flight,
got the price for it, booked the flight, then realize that was the last ticket
and you travel partner couldn't come with you.
As we are updating these filters, the prices are going to be updating here.
So, in this case, if you're searching a round-trip flight for two passengers,
this is going to be the total price for both of you
to flight to the destination and home again
in the currency that you selected at the bottom.
Next you have the fare class;
unfortunately you can only select one of these to search at a time.
If you're looking for the cheapest flights,
you're going to want to stick with just "Economy."
The final factor of a basic search is going to be your dates,
you you'll click this blue calendar right here
and you'll first want to reset the dates,
and then you'll notice that "Departure date" has been highlighted.
This is where Google Flights can really show you
that just by changing your dates by one day
you can end up saving hundreds of dollars.
The numbers that you see here in green
are going to be the total price for the round trip
and the ones that are in green are the ones
that Google is telling you is the best deal for that departure date
based on the length of your trip,
which you can change down here.
Let's say you have a one-week vacation,
this is a short vacation to go to Bangkok but for this example it will be fine,
so you have seven days to play with.
If you can leave any time during this week,
you would select the fourth because it's going to be the cheapest flight.
Once you click on it, you'll now notice that the return date is highlighted,
and then the prices that you're seeing are going to be the round trip price
if you were to return on that day.
So exactly seven days later we're getting the cheapest flight here at USD 776.
If you are happy with that flight, you would click on it and then hit "Done."
So we're now searching Ottawa to Bangkok
for one passenger on a round trip, in economy,
for these specific dates.
And then these are going to be the best flights, the cheapest flights,
that Google is recommending to us.
If you are flexible with your dates or with your trip length,
you're going to love the date grid and the price graph.
We'll start with the date grid;
this is probably my favorite feature on all of Google Flights.
What they have along the top here
is a full week of when you could possibly depart,
and then down in the y-axis is going to be all of your possible return dates.
If you decide you can leave later or return sooner,
you can change these and just play around.
What Google Flights is doing here
is they're showing you in red the most expensive,
gray the ones in the middle,
and then green, the ones we want to pay attention to,
which is going to be the cheapest round trip price, all taxes included.
Google Flights goes a step further
and is going highlight in green the best deals on the page that your viewing,
You'll want to look for the flights that are green
and then highlighted in green,
And when you select on that,
it's going to be the intersection of the x-axis and the y-axis
that is going to be your departure and your arrival.
So here we would be leaving on February 3rd
and we would be returning back home on February 11th,
and those look like they're the best prices for our date range.
Next you can look at the price graph.
The price graph is great if you have flexibility on your dates
but you have to have a specific trip length.
If you know you have seven days of vacation to use
but you can use that vacation any time,
you can then set the trip length to seven days
and you'll be able to see what days will be the cheapest for you
to go and take this trip to Bangkok.
So here it would make sense if we were leaving on Tuesday the 4th
and then any of these days here would also be cheap
if you wanted to leave later on the 24th of February and so on.
You can easily see, based on your trip length,
when it is going to be the cheapest time to take that vacation.
Next to it we have airports,
so it's telling you if there's airports that are nearby your destination.
So we're flying into Bangkok's main airport here,
but there's another airport that's about a 40-minute drive from the main airport,
which is Don Mueang International,
so you can also click "Add Airport" here
and it's going to get you the best price for the two of these.
So, if it's cheaper to fly into Don Mueang,
they will show you flights that are flying into Don Mueang.
I can guarantee it's not going to be cheaper
because they do a lot of domestic flights and flights around Asia.
Just going to leave that for now.
And the finally, up here you have tips.
"Tips" usually doesn't help you with booking cheap flights
but it may give you some insight into the destination that your going to;
for now we're just going to ignore this.
All of these options, the nearby airports, price graph, and date grid,
can be found here as well.
Another great feature with Google Flights
is if you scroll down a little bit more and hit the drop-down arrow here,
it's going to tell you what the price is
in comparison to the history of this exact flight on these dates,
it's going to give you some insight
into whether or not it's a good time to book this flight.
Sometimes you can wait one day
and the flight is going to jump by a couple hundred dollars,
and then you come back the next day and it's $300 cheaper,
it really depends.
So here it's showing you the price history,
so you can see over time, historically,
about how much people are paying for this exact same flight.
At the moment, it's telling us the prices are relatively typical,
and because this flight is coming up in a week from now,
it's probably only going to be getting
more and more expensive if you were to wait.
It would be a pretty good time to be booking this flight today.
If you're ready to book, you can also head up here
and you can use the "Track prices" feature.
It's going to monitor the lowest price for this trip
and then it will send you a price alert by email any time there's a price change.
By putting it on you're now subscribed,
so if this flight suddenly went down to $700,
you would be immediately notified and you'd be able to book it on the spot.
You may not see this "Track prices" option
if you're not logged in to your Google account.
Next I'll briefly run through these filters
and why they're actually quite important to pay attention to
depending on your own situation.
If you are planning to bring multiple bags with you, add them here;
it's now going to give you the best price based on that number of bags.
Sometimes an airline will end up charging you USD 60, USD 70,
to bring extra bags with you,
so Google Flights is going to give you the best price
for the number of bags that you need.
"Stops" is going to be how many layovers you have,
"Direct flights" will be no-stops only,
they're going to be the fastest but also the most expensive.
It's grayed-out here because there aren't, unfortunately,
no direct flights from Ottawa to Bangkok.
Here you have to decide if the money is more worth it to you
or if the time is more worth it to you;
the more stops, the more time-consuming it's going to be.
I also have heard a statistic that about 80% of complications with the airplane
happen on takeoff and landing,
so the more stops you have,
the more chance there is for a complication.
Just something else to think about.
Here you can decide which airlines or which alliances
you would like to book with specifically,
and then it will only show you those flights.
You can select "Only" if you only wanted to fly with Air Canada,
then you can go through and choose any others that you'd like,
you can select all airlines or none,
and then, if you collect points with a specific alliance,
you can filter it so they only show flights with that alliance.
"Price," here you can set the maximum you're willing to pay.
I usually don't touch this, I just look at what Google is suggesting
and see the lowest prices.
"Times" might be important if there is a certain time of day
that you are able to leave by,
if you don't want to leave overnight for example too,
and then if there's a specific time
that you need to be at your arrival destination.
Maybe you have a dinner to make, or a conference.
You can do the same for your return.
"Connecting airports."
"Stopover duration" is going to be how long you're willing to spend
at a single layover.
Layover can be 24 hours, 48 hours, five hours,
so you can set a specific maximum amount.
By leaving "Any," you're opening yourself up
to finding the cheapest flights,
although you may end up with an unreasonably long layover.
I like to leave all of them just to see all of my options.
As for connecting airports, I also actually do use this feature.
I often won't want to fly through the US
if my final destination is outside of the US,
because when you buy health insurance, it sometimes jumps the price,
just because you're traveling through a US airport,
from when the airplane takes off in Ottawa
to when it arrives and touches down in Bangkok,
including my stop in Toronto and in Japan.
The total trip length will be 25 hours including all of those flights
and all of those layovers.
I often will filter because sometimes you can find a very cheap flight
but it's going to give you a layover somewhere of 24 hours,
which means you're having to book a hotel anyway
and that will end up costing you whatever you end up saving on that ticket.
The final option here is to show separate tickets
or to hide separate tickets.
Here you can determine whether or not
you're open to flying on separately booked tickets.
For example, you would fly out to your destination on one airline
and then return home to your destination on another airline,
or you may fly part of your trip with one airline
and then the next part with another airline.
The only thing is that the ticket is going to be booked separately,
that means you would have to check in for the flights separately
and means you wouldn't be able to go straight through connections
if your second leg was with a different airline,
you would need to go through security all over again
and you would need to get your bag and then recheck your bag.
So it's up to you.
I usually leave "Show separate tickets" as highlighted,
it will only show you separate ticket booking
if the price is going to be significantly cheaper,
so I usually leave it selected but I'm rarely ever shown the option.
If it is going to be a separate ticket,
you will be made aware that it is a separate ticket.
One other thing to note here
if that if you do end up adding multiple departures or arrival airports,
if you put those in and you pull up the price graph or the date grid,
it's now showing you the best prices
for every combination of departure and every combination of arrival.
Google Flights is by far the most flexible tool
to find and book the best flight deals.
It's been my go-to for years
and has scored me half a dozen round trips to Asia
for under $700 each.
In an effort not to completely overload you with information,
in my next video I'll covering how to actually make a booking
as well as answering questions like if flights are refundable,
and including bonus tips to make sure that you always get the best deal.
Let me know in the comments if you've ever used
Google Flights to search for deals.
Don't forget to give this video a thumbs-up - thank you -
and then hit "Subscribe" so we can meet back here again next week.
Have a good one. Bye.