Google Travel – Explore Flights, Hotels, Destinations

You’re likely using several major travel portals to plan and book your travel reservations, from flights to hotels to tours. You might find better vacation satisfaction by using a more generalized travel tool early in your exploration.

While Expedia, Hotels.com, Cheapflights, Booking.com, and Travelocity get all the ink, travelers still use other travel websites such as Google Travel to do an initial, carefree exploration of travel destinations, etc. Others use travel management software as a customer which may work if you’re a business traveler familiar with a destination city.

I like Google Travel for its simplicity, map-based features, and that it accesses just about every other travel portal, hotel or airline. Initially, I don’t like being forced into purchase decisions or to be analytical too soon about my travel dream. Instead, just laying back and getting a feel for a destination city is best.

For instance, I’ve been interested in Switzerland, Italy and Mexico lately. However, I don’t know which cities/regions offer the best experience for me specifically. Some travel niche blogs and booking sites are obsessed with their single destinations and expect blind obedience to their word and make quick purchases. That’s actually disrespectful to visitors who should progress at their leisure.

In reality, travelers like to travel mentally first to find out how they really feel about what they want. Which country offers the absolute best experience: Switzerland, Italy or Mexico? It’s all personal of course.

As travelers, we’re not sure how we feel about destinations and boutique hotels, or how we want to tour and experience a destination. These are critically important to our fantasized journey. A laid-back travel portal that helps us get to articles, photos, videos and reviews is the best place to start.

I’ve used Google Travel many times before my leisure or business adventures and all in all, it can be trustworthy and lead to more specific help. Given it’s integrated with their search feature, you have a reliable assistant.

Soon AI will make its presence felt and that could be a bad thing for travelers since the system is pushing pre-conceived content paths at you, when you need to explore travel content naturally according to your own real likes, as awkward as that might be. It’s not wasteful, it’s how you explore your travel dream. That needs to be respected.

Exploring the Google Travel Website

So why not explore this portal and see what it’s advantages are. If you use Gmail, Google Maps, Google Small Business and other Google apps, you’ll feel comfortable using this travel site.

Google (Alphabet) itself launched a travel planning product, called Google Trips, initially as a mobile app, and it now resides at Google Travel.

You might see it as a fast, handy travel exploration tool with links to sites where you can book your flight, hotel, bus, train, or vacation rental.

It’s hard for travelers to ignore Google’s usual streamlined, easy-to-understand and reliable travel platform. Google Finance is one more example of a user friendly consumer experience that Google’s brand is built upon. Via Google Travel however, you can explore destinations, flights, hotels, train/buses, and even vacation rentals. It lists the flights, hotels, and rentals you might want and the Google user reviews plus search filters can help you find the best prices with reliable airlines and hotels.

Works Well for Travel Business Companies Too

If you’re a travel business manager, your Google business listing might help you get exposure on the maps based system they use.

Via Google business listing optimization techniques, you might draw considerable traffic from Google Travel and Google Maps, gaining brand exposure and bookings. Google Hotels in particular is a valuable source of traveler booking leads. Given so many travelers go to Google search to research and buy, Google Travel is featured at the top of Google search results, which is powerful given it’s free and enjoys massive numbers of users.

Google Travel isn’t as biased as other travel services and doesn’t favor anyone based on payments to them. So, you may be accessing more reliable offerings, although perhaps not as well vetted as some other travel portals. Google Travel (hotels) offers plenty of user-generated content such as images which can provide a more accurate and complete view of a property or destination you’re investigating. And there are links to the hotel or airline’s own website where you can check out prices directly.

In essence, Google Travel let’s you explore destinations, flights, and hotel aggregated listings with no commitment or registration needed. There are many useful search filters such as filtering flights by baggage fees, or hotels by hot tubs, and you can see the airline flight price history to see when prices might be more reasonable.

The site or service isn’t well developed with all the bells and whistles, and instead offers specialized search boxes to help travelers explore using the Google search engine. While that might seem like a downer or common feature with limited satisfaction, Google’s search engine is the best available and you can drill down as needed.

Other travel sites such as Expedia, Travelocity, Kayak, Priceline, Skyscanner, Booking.com, etc. might lead to more specific and useful products, travel packages, travel tours, and travel software products, but Google does include sponsored links from those providers in its location search results.

Google Flights

After searching for an available flight to a destination on specific dates, you can click through directly to the airline’s own website to book the flight.

Google Hotels

Next to flights, the hotel exploration tool is useful. The maps-based feature lays out hotel locations as you can see, and you can click on the map link to view the rooms and amenities.

Almost instinctively, affordable hotel rooms are shown in this Los Angeles hotel search below. The big hotel portals always show the most expensive rooms, which only appeal to wealthy searchers. And those portals present all sorts of distractions to get a quick sale, such as a time-limited offer.

Vacation Rentals Too!

Not many realize that vacation rental homes and apartments are available too. Again, it’s the zero commitment, free exploration benefit that helps you wade through listings to gauge what’s available out there. The filters let you drill down at price points, amenities, and guest ratings.

Google’s Travel website may lack the infinite tools you’ll find on Expedia or Booking.com, but it is an easy-to-use and familiar tool to start your 2024 travel planning.

See more travel posts and explore the best travel destinations in 2024.