Google Flight Search is Now Up and Running

You might have heard about the recent Google acquisition of ITA software, a company that specialized in airline data. The acquisition initially got stuck in regulatory hurdles and was finally cleared in April this year. And it has already started bearing fruits for Google. Google’s Flight Search feature is now up and running.

So, going forward, when you search for flights on Google, you will see a Flights link on the left that will lead you to their dedicated flight search page. You may independently access it by going to www.google.com/flights/ too.

The screenshot below shows the first page that you’ll see when you visit this URL. There are From and To tabs where you need to enter the respective locations.

You can put in the departure and return dates, price, duration etc. It’ll show the results accordingly.

The left sidebar, as you can see below, has many options too. You could filter by number of stops, the airline you prefer, connections, outbound time and return time.

You can get more details about each flight in the result. When you hover over any of them, it gets highlighted automatically.

Clicking on that result pulls up more information about the various return flights available from that airline.

As with any new Google product, this one too comes with some caveats:

• The tool only works for select US cities at the moment.
• Only shows results for round-trip economy-class flights.

Google says that they will improve upon this soon so I guess we need to watch this space.