Here’s a quick Google search tip for frequent flyers. If you’re fond of booking your flights online rather than calling up a travel agent to do the booking for you, Google can be a handy tool in searching for the best deals. Of course, you probably know that already. But what you may not be aware of is that you don’t have to type in complicated keywords just to look for your desired flights.

You can just key in the city abbreviations of your point of departure and the destination for a quick overview of available online bookings.

So for instance I want to look for flights from New York City (NYC) to Los Angeles (LAX), I just type in “nyc lax” (without the quotes) into the search box.

After I hit the search button, the first result would be from expedia.com, and I can actually key in the dates of the departure and return trip.

The bottom links let me choose which online booking site to use for these flight details. Let’s say we click on Expedia. We are then brought to a splash page telling us that our query is being processed.

Then after a while, a table with choices for airlines, seat types and flight details is shown. Now we can choose which flight to book!

If we need to refine our search (such as change flight dates and cities), we can then just use the left search pane on Expedia. The other online ticket retailers have this feature too.

So looking for tickets is as quick as keying in a few letters on Google. Actually you don’t always have to remember the three-letter abbreviation for the cities. Just key in the names of the point of origin and destination city and you’re good to go.

It doesn’t even have to be within the US, as with this New York to London search:

Bon Voyage!