Looking for a cheap flight? Google it!

Tuesday, July 18, 2017

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- With so many travel sites for booking cheap flights, the one you might be overlooking is likely in front of you all the time. We're talking about Google. Conde Nast said its tops for so many reasons.

You can use Google for quick and spontaneous trips. Today, tomorrow or next week you simply enter your departure city and scroll down to destinations. You'll find a map of the world to price compare. Something surprising, sometimes traveling to Europe is cheaper than heading to the west coast.

Use Google Flights to book your next trip.

Google Flights shows you all the cheaper options if you are flexible. Search up to five airport codes in the departure field and an additional five for the destination field and now you have plenty of options to choose from.

Find out about all the perks. Google Flights offers information on in-seat power ports, Wi-Fi, and legroom alongside every flight you search. You can find it when clicking on any specific flight.

This is a crucial tip because that $37 you saved on the ticket might not seem so great when you accidentally forgo Wi-Fi, power ports, and an additional two inches of legroom compared to another flight you could have booked.

Google Flights allows you to set alerts for changes in flight prices.

Here's another pro trip: Google automatically creates a list of best flights based on connection times and amenities.

Search once, set alerts and rejoice in savings.

Are you not quite ready to buy, or just want to see how fares change? Searching exhaustively for that all-time greatest deal offers a certain thrill, it's much more practical to have it pop into your inbox automatically.

Tap the "track prices" button and Google Flights will search for your flight request hourly and daily and let you know if things change, up or down. The platform even has smart tools to warn you when the fare may increase or decrease, along with the percentage of certainty behind the prediction.

The service Hopper also has a price predictor that works in a similar way. Both reportedly work comparably, with roughly 80 percent success rates.

Google Flights offers multi-city search options.

Take advantage of the multi-city tool. You may not like connections, but you'll love them if you know how to use them. If you find a flight using the standard round-trip search with a layover city you want to explore, you can attempt to extend that layover by switching from a simple round-trip to "multi-city."

Using the multi-city tool, you'd search from your departure point to the connection city as your first segment, and then attempt to enter a later date from that connection city to your final destination.

Not all tickets will allow for this flexibility, but many will. Turning a six hour layover in London into two nights in an amazing city on the way to your destination sure beats the alternative.