Best holiday deals at your fingertips: Google makes price insights richer
US tech giant’s latest device provides booking information and an array of new features, giving tips on how to get the best value for money when booking flights and rooms
It’s the most wonderful time of the year – and by that, we mean the lazy, late days of summer. New insights from Google also reveal that right now – late August – might also be the best time to start thinking about your holiday travels if you want to get the best flight or hotel deal.
In fact, flight searches for Thanksgiving will spike by 76 per cent in September. By October, they’ll increase by a further 95 per cent. Book now, and you can pay half as much as one of those procrastinators.
“Research suggests that consumers are more stressed about what they’re paying for flights and hotels than just about any other consumer purchase that they make,” Richard Holden, vice-president of Google Travel, told Bloomberg. Buyer’s remorse, he says, is far more common when you’re shopping for an airfare than, say, a flat-screen TV. “People worry that they’ll miss out on a future price drop, so we’ve decided to make our price insights richer – telling consumers whether what they’re paying is a low price, a high one, or a fair one.”
The result isn’t just this handy tool, which uses last year’s prices to predict the rise and fall of airfares across the 25 most popular US routes for Thanksgiving, the winter holidays, and New Year’s. It’s a deluge of new features that will inspire confidence in your future travel purchases, no matter where or when you’re going.
Hotel price insights
Power users of Google Flights will know that price insights already existed when you looked up tickets. Flights from New York to Paris, for instance, show red and green numbers under each day of the month to contextualise average prices based on the calendar – explaining whether they were above or below the mean. Now, for the first time, there’s a comparable tool for hotel prices.
Type “New York City hotels” into your Google app, and you’ll trigger the engine. It works for any city in the world, big or small – from Tokyo to Kanazawa. Then select your dates and your favourite property, and a new feature will pop up. Look for the “compare market prices” button and you’ll be able to see whether current prices are fluctuating and whether they’re low, typical, or high – all based on prices for similarly rated hotels in the same vicinity.
“It’s hard to know whether US$300 is a good price for a hotel on a particular night – this gives you a sense based on star ratings, and later we’ll take even more data into account. It’s all about comprehensiveness and transparency,” said Holden.