Google Flights: The Best Way to Compare Flight Ticket
Our family values travel as an investment. It provides a lot of lessons, broadening our point of view, strengthen family bonding, and of course creating invaluable memories. We travel a lot. As the ministry of finance of the family, I am responsible for travel arrangements, especially accommodation and flight tickets.
We may know several flight aggregators that compare the ticket prices out there, like Expedia, Skyscanner, Traveloka, Tiket.com, and many more. I used to use them to search for flights, but since I find Google Flights, it becomes my top of mind. I think Google Flights is more powerful compared to those aggregators. How so? Let's take a look together.
Flexible Search
Multiple cities
The cool thing about Google Flight is it allows us to do multiple search at once - up to 7 departures and 7 destinations. It saves tons of time when we have to travel multi cities with a different departures and destinations, because travel aggregators usually limit their search into one way or round trip only.
For example, you don't have a specific airport in mind. Let's say you are not sure whether you want to depart from Jakarta, Surabaya or Yogyakarta. You may just enter the cities for your departure. For the destinations, you can type any cities you wish to go. Search result will show you the best possible options all at once, instead of looking up the price of each route individually.
What I like about Google Flight is the way it show us many options of the flight. For example you want to book a flight to Australia but not sure to which city is the most economical. You can just type in "Australia" in the destination box, and it will show all the flight prices to Australia.
Multiple dates
In Google Flights, I can find the cheapest flight easily. After typing in the departures and destinations, clicking the calendar icon will display a calendar view showing prices for the whole month. The cheapest price will be shown in green.
Flight Insights
Besides the flexible search, Google Flight gives me a lot of insight that help me take the best decision. Here are the features that I love from Google Flight.
Date Grid
Date grid shows the price of all combination of flight departure and return. This visual helps me a lot in finding the best date for the cheapest flight.
Price Graph
The feature shows the visual graph of the price so we can see easily the price trends of the flight for a selected duration. We can also adjust our trip duration and the graph will also adjust to it.
The Implementation
For me personally, I use Google Flight only as a tool for research to find the best flight option and of course the most economical. Economical is not always the cheapest. Budget airlines may seem the cheapest, but if we put the add-ons for baggage, seat, and food, the price may be even higher than the full service airline. If there's no big different on the pricing, I would go with full service airlines for the sake for travel convenience.
After deciding the travel dates and the airline, I would book my ticket from those flight aggregator website. They usually will have promotions that makes the total bill even cheaper.