Google Flights, Google’s airline search engine, allows users to look for the best flights that work for their travel plans. In the conventional sense, it is not an online travel agent, but a metasearch engine, which can give you trips on many datapoints, such as if your flight has wifi or not, but the most common use, for everyone, is to find the cheapest air tickets.

To look for flights on Google Flights, you head to google.com/flights. For some reason, they don’t have an app yet. You input your location, destination and travel dates, and then you start looking at the results.

The first adjustment to make to your search results is the sorting order. Google places a certain value on your trip to arrive at the Best flights. Typically, I would sort it by the cheapest price, which would show me non-stop and many-stop itineraries as well. To select my time preferences, I use the appropriate filters as well.

But Google Flights really shines when you allow it to show you flights from nearby airports as well. For instance, if you were looking for a flight from Dubai International Airport (DXB), it would also show you flights from Dubai World Central (DWC), if available. You can then choose if the driving is worth a lesser fare from DWC if available.

From the Google Flights homepage, you can view many other insights, for instance, alternate departure dates that have a cheaper prices. Or alternate airports which would price cheaper. Google Flights price graph can help you figure out if you should purchase tickets immediately or wait until later. If you are flexible to travel, you could find a much better deal to travel as well.

Sometimes, you can find tickets on routing which you won’t be able to recreate yourself, which would work out for you. For instance, I was able to once create a routing between Mumbai and New York, where I went between Mumbai and New York JFK on Etihad Airways (I wanted to use US pre-clearance at Abu Dhabi), but on the way back, I was able to book a Delta ticket to Amsterdam and connect to Jet Airways Amsterdam to Mumbai service, all on the same ticket.

Once you have figured out the ticket you want to book, but if you are not ready to book, you can just send the flight details to yourself using email.

Sometimes, you may want to track prices a few days before committing to the flight. You can track the flights as well, and get real-time alerts when the flight price changes.

Often, people chase the fare, and not the destination. Google has already used that insight, and you can see Google’s insights on cheap flights when you want to just plan a weekend.

There is of course, many a powerful features which I will deliberate on another column soon. For now, if you haven’t used Google Flights and been living under a rock, perhaps it is time to discover the best way to plan your flights from now on.

Ajay Awtaney is a business travel & aviation journalist based in Mumbai, and the founder of the Indian frequent-traveller website Live From A Lounge (www.livefromalounge.com.) Ajay flies over 200,000 miles every year, and tweets about The Business of Travel at @LiveFromALounge.

First Published:May 3, 2019 3:16 PM IST