- cross-posted to:
- technews@radiation.party
- cross-posted to:
- technews@radiation.party
You must log in or register to comment.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Google Flights today is releasing a new feature that will help travelers better determine the right time to book.
Rolling out this week, the company is debuting new insights that will leverage historical trend data that lets consumers see when prices have typically been lowest to their chosen destination on their selected dates.
The addition aims to help consumers answer the question as to whether it’s better to book their flight now or wait for lower prices.
The feature complements other insights Google Flights already offers, like the ability to see whether current prices for your search are low, typical, or high, compared to past averages.
Some flights will also feature a price guarantee badge which means Google is confident the fare won’t get any lower before departure.
Plus, there’s no longer a “sweet spot” where prices dip before going back up for U.S. trips to Europe, it found.
The original article contains 351 words, the summary contains 149 words. Saved 58%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is going to fuck itself up. The predictions are based on what has happened before this information was made easily available. Making it easily available will change booking habits, and thus the prices on offer at different times. Especially as the airlines can (try to) anticipate an avalanche of bookings at particular timepoints and so know that they won’t necessarily need to lower prices to fill the flights.
It will be interesting to see how this pans out.
Fortunately, most travel (in the US) is tied to school schedules and I don’t think this will impact those travel patterns or routes. Perhaps shorter weekend trips will see some changes though but I think most people have a decent sense of good prices vs bad even without this type of enhancement from google flights.
It’s not about when they fly, it’s about when they book the tickets.
For low cost carriers, be sure to check their official site because often google will bring up re-sellers as “the cheapest price”, which isn’t always the case.
TIL: There was something called Google Flights.
My experience with it is that it’s better at finding good prices than other more popular websites because it shows prices that are closer to reality when you go to actually buy the tickets.
TIL people use kayak or something?
