Flight deals and sales have started to pop up pretty frequently these days. Just because a flight is on “sale,” however, doesn’t mean that sale price is actually a deal.
This week Google rolled out new flight price insights. It won’t work for every flight, but for many flights you might be considering, Google can let you know if the flight is low, high, or typical for what it traditionally is.
So, hypothetically, if an airline is offering a $737 ticket to Hawaii you can tell if that’s a huge discount from what the flight typically costs or just something that’s being advertised as a deal when it’s actually on-par with what the average price is this time of year.
For instance, I looked up a $778 Hawaiian flight to Honolulu. At the bottom of the screen, it tells me that $778 is pretty typical for this flight and that the average cost for similar flights is between $686 and $1047.
Given that information, I might go ahead and book it. If Google instead said the price was high, or I was near the top of that “typical” cost window rather than the bottom, I might poke around a bit for a different flight or adjust my travel dates a bit.
In addition to the basic info, you can also view the price history for a particular flight to get a better idea of whether that price is going up or down. It looks like if I had pulled the trigger on my Honolulu flight around 45 days ago I could have gotten it for around $627. That’s good info for next time.
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