If you’ve ever booked an airfare on Google Flights, you’ll probably know the low, medium, or high rating given to a booking to let you know what kind of deal you’re getting. But a new feature will let you know the date range you can book in to get the lowest price.
Google Flights already has a price history feature that allows users to view a graph of ticket prices over the past few months. Now, if the prices are normal or high, Google suggests reservation dates when the prices will be lower. If the current price is low, Google estimates how much time users have to book their flight.
To test this feature, I checked potential flights between Paris and Toulouse. Google Flights told me that the current price for the dates it was considering was the lowest. He recommended me to book by September 10th.
Of course, buying a plane ticket at the exact moment when it is the cheapest is not an exact science.
By clicking on this recommendation, we get a little more information. Google adds: “The lowest prices for similar trips to Toulouse are usually offered around 1-4 months before take-off. On average, flights are then €11 cheaper.”
The new dates estimated by Google are not available for all flights, but only for those for which there is enough data to make a correct estimate.
Of course, buying a plane ticket at the exact moment when it’s cheapest isn’t an exact science, and you’ll find countless tips online for hitting that magical moment. And just because tickets are historically cheaper in a given month doesn’t mean the same month next year will yield the same result.
But Google believes in its algorithms so much that it recently started guaranteeing the price of certain flights. For some flights in the United States, Google Flights lists a “guaranteed price”, which means that the price must remain the same until the flight departs. If the price of the flight drops, Google refunds the difference.
If you want to manually monitor the situation instead of relying on the date offered by Google, you can enable Flights price tracking, which automatically sends you an alert if the price of a ticket drops significantly.
Source: “ZDNet.com”