Google Flights Gains Popularity Among Millennials as It Adds Booking Sites
Photo Credit: Google has been expanding its Flights search tool to new markets, such as Brazil and Indonesia, in the past couple of months. A new survey shows it is gaining in popularity. Google Flights
Skift Take
Despite recent gains, Google Flights is still the price-comparison tool of tomorrow, and not today -- unless its scale makes the instant booking of flights a standard way of doing things.
One in 10 frequent flyers on average in North America start their airfare shopping on Google Flights, according to a survey of nearly 2,500 frequent travelers by airline data firm OAG.
But frequent travelers between ages 18 and 32 years old are more than twice (21 percent) as likely as the average traveler to start their search process with Google Flights, says OAG’s research.
Users were asked: “When starting your search process, how do you start your search?”
The multiple choice options included Google Flights, airline website, OTA (online travel agency), travel agent, Bing/Yahoo, discount travel site or app, or other.
Since last summer Google has added some online booking sites to the Flights results. These moves — plus others, like expanding instant booking — may help explain why Google's price-comparison product is gaining traction with the next generation of travelers.
OAG's survey isn't perfect. It isn't clear whether respondents meant they started their
