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Online Travel

Google Flights Now Notifies Flyers When Airfares Will Expire

Dennis Schaal photo
Dennis Schaal

Photo Credit: Google Flights is now informing users when an airfare will expire so they will know whether to book the flight or wait.  Google

Skift Take

Google has several very clear advantages over competitors: its mountains of data sets and the computing power to do something with them. That's the context of some of these incremental changes in Google Flights and hotel search. Slowly but surely, after much data crunching and testing, Google -- which already is one of the largest players in travel -- is enhancing its flight and hotel products for consumers and advertisers.

Plenty of flights apps these days inform users whether they expect airfares to rise or fall but Google Flights is taking its features one step further and notifying flyers when airfares will expire. For a November 21 Delta flight from New York's JFK airport to San Diego, for example, Google Flights lets users know that the airfare will likely expire in eight hours and a fare increase will kick in. Rival flight-deal apps such as Hopper and Hitlist don't offer such airfare expiration notifications. Neither does Kayak or Skyscanner. Google hopes to solve a pain point with these notifications: When travelers see an airfare and they are wondering if they can book it tom

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