multi flight trip google

How to book a flight on Google Flights for your next trip

• You can book a flight on Google Flights up to one year in advance, and even monitor prices for your flight to buy at the best time.
• Google Flights usually finds the cheapest fare for your flight, but it's still a good idea to cross-reference other sites like Expedia to get the best deal.
• Google Flights also suggests trips for the cheapest flights from your city for the next six months.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories .

I travel by air about once a month, and several times a year with my family of four, so finding the best rates on air travel is a rather regular theme in my life. 

Before I book any trip, I always use Google Flights as my first search tool. While Google's flight booking platform is not always the cheapest route, it is one of the simplest ways to look for flights. 

Check out the products mentioned in this article:

Macbook pro (from $1,299.99 at best buy), microsoft surface pro 7 (from $699.99 at best buy), how to book a flight on google flights.

To book a flight with Google Flights, first you should sign into your Google account on your Mac or PC .  You can go through most of the process without doing so, but your research will be lost if you close your browser without signing in.

1. Navigate to Google Flights on your PC or Mac computer. 

2. Click on "Round trip" to select from the dropdown menu whether you're looking for a round trip, one-way, or multi-city ticket. 

3. Then, next to the ticket type option click on "1 passenger" to select how many tickets you need. Click on the blue "+" icon to add a passenger to that category, or the "-" sign to take off the passenger. 

4. Then, click on "Economy" to select the class of ticket you're looking for.

5. In the box on the bottom-left enter the airport code or the name of the city or airport you'd fly out of. In the box on the right enter the airport code or city or airport name that you'd like to fly to.

6. For a roundtrip flight, in the boxes on the far-right, click the box on the left to select the date that you'd like to leave in the pop-up window. Then, click on the date that you'd like to return in the pop-up calendar. You can click the arrow in the middle of the box on the right to see the next month. 

7. For a one-way flight, click the box on the right and select the date for your flight in the pop-up calendar.

8. For a multi-city trip, select a date for your first flight by clicking the box on the far-right, and then click the blue "Add Flight" button in the bottom-left of the window. Another flight should pop-up underneath the first flight. Select the destinations and date for your trip. You can add up to five flights to a multi-city trip. 

• Multi-city trips are useful if you want to visit multiple places and conveniently search and book your tickets all at once. For example, with a multi-city search you could find the best deals for your three week trip from New York to New Orleans to Italy and then back to New York without having to do multiple searches.

9. Once you've selected your dates click the blue "DONE" button at the bottom of the window.

10. Once you're done entering all of your flight info, click the blue "Search" button at the bottom of the window. 

11. On the next page, a list of flights will be shown. If you selected roundtrip, these will be the options for your departing flight. If you selected multi-city, these will be the options for your first flight. The top three results are what Google deams your "best options," which it decides by comparing their convenience and price with other options.

12. You can change the order and comparison of flights by clicking the arrows next to "Sort by:" in the top-right and selecting from the dropdown menu how you'd like to sort your flight options. You can filter flights using the options at the top. You can also see more flights by clicking the "More" dropdown option (though they will be much pricier).

13. Select your flight by clicking on it. If you selected a roundtrip flight, then on the next page select your return flight as well. If multi-city, select all of your remaining flights. 

14. Once you've selected all of your flights you will be taken to a page with the flight(s) that you selected, the price, your booking options, and any other information relevant to your trip, such as extra baggage costs. 

15. Under "Booking options," click the blue "Select" box next to the airline or travel site that you'd like to purchase your ticket from.

16. You will now be taken either directly to the page of the airline or travel site to complete your booking, or if the option says "Book on Google," you'll be able to fill out your information and purchase the ticket directly on Google Flights. 

Related coverage from  How To Do Everything: Tech :

How to find and track flights using google flights to get the best deal on your next flight, how to add flight details to your google calendar manually or automatically, how to add a boarding pass to your google pay app, how to add holidays to your google calendar on desktop or mobile, how to print your google calendar for a specific range of time using a computer.

On February 28, Axel Springer, Business Insider's parent company, joined 31 other media groups and filed a $2.3 billion suit against Google in Dutch court, alleging losses suffered due to the company's advertising practices.

Insider Inc. receives a commission when you buy through our links.

• Main content

Popular destinations

How to Use Google Flights: A Guide to Finding Cheap Flights [2024]

Scott Keyes

December 5, 2023

17 min read

Before I explain why Google Flights is my favorite flight search engine—and why Going includes its sample searches in nearly every Going deal we send to 2 million+ members —let me tell you a secret that few in the travel industry are willing to admit:

There’s no single cheapest place to book flights. And that’s why I love Google Flights.

As someone who’s spent years (years!) of my life sifting through millions of fares across hundreds of airlines and flight search engines, I can tell you with confidence: They’re all basically the same.

That’s not bad news—it’s great news. It means you’ll still get the same deal with whichever flight search engine you prefer. And the one I’ve personally found that’s both easiest and most powerful is Google Flights.

(In case you had any doubt, we don’t get any commission, compensation, kickbacks, good vibes, or anything at all for this recommendation. Our loyalty at Going is to cheap flights. Period.)

Pros of Google Flights

There’s a lot to love about Google Flights. Here are my favorite features:

• Lightning fast: Google Flights is faster than any other flight search engine, displaying months' worth of fares in fractions of a second.
• Calendar-based fare view: Google Flights has a simple, intuitive calendar view that shows you the cheapest fare over the next 12 months.
• Multiple airport search: Google Flights lets you search for the cheapest fare between up to 7 origin and 7 destination airports, without slowing the search down.
• Map-based search: The Google Flights Explore map lets you see the cheapest place to fly from your airport during your selected dates/date range.
• Tools to help you choose: Google Flights will tell you if the fare you're seeing is high, low, or average for the trip, and it shows you the carbon footprint of each flight.

Let me give you an example of how this all comes together to help you get a cheap flight.

Let’s say you live in Philadelphia and want to visit Europe next summer. A typical flight search engine will restrict your search to flights departing Philly and arriving in one specific European airport, say Paris. If you’re also interested in fares to Amsterdam, you’d need to search again.

With Google Flights, though, you could set as your departure airport not just Philadelphia, but also six other airports that are a short train ride away—three in the New York City area and three in the Washington DC area. For your destination, you could include Paris, Amsterdam, and up to five more airports. Google Flights will take those inputs and show you the cheapest possible fares among those 49 possible routes. (Plus, it’ll give you results not just for a specific date, but across the entire 12-month calendar.)

The result:

• Other search engines (June 5-12): $1,282 from Philadelphia to Paris
• Google Flights (June 5-12): $431 from NYC to Paris

By letting you check up to 7 departure and 7 arrival airports at the same time, Google Flights saved us $851 (minus the small train fare up to NYC).

Cons of Google Flights

Google Flights isn’t perfect. Here are the drawbacks to be aware of:

• Doesn't always have the lowest fares: Google Flights works by searching fares sold directly from the airlines and a handful of the top online travel agencies (OTAs) , such as Expedia and Orbitz. Sometimes smaller OTAs (which Google Flights doesn’t look at) have fares a tad bit cheaper, but these sites can carry significant risks.
• Doesn't show all airlines: Google Flights doesn't display results from Southwest Airlines, so you'll also need to check those directly with the airline’s website. (Thankfully, Southwest's Low Fare Calendar is pretty user-friendly.)
• Displays expired deals: Every once in a while, Google Flights will tell you a fare is available at a certain rate, but when you click to proceed with a booking, either (a) the fare jumps in price, or (b) there is no way to book online and instructs you instead to call the airline. (Don’t bother calling—it won’t work.) This phenomenon is called " ghosting " and happens occasionally on Google Flights when a fare was recently available but no longer is.

How to use Google Flights

Google Flights searches fares on nearly every airline’s website, as well as the largest online travel agencies like Orbitz, Expedia, and Priceline. Here’s a Google Flights tutorial below. 

How to set departure and arrival locations on Google Flights to get the most options

When you get to the homepage, type in where you want to fly from and where you want to travel to, along with your preferred travel dates. Here’s an example:

Three things to remember:

• You can put the destination as a country or even an entire continent. If you’re curious to find the cheapest flight to the Caribbean over the winter holidays, put “Caribbean” as your destination.
• You can add up to seven airports in each box, separated by commas. If you’re looking for a cheap trip to anywhere in Europe, for example, you might put as your destination “LHR, CDG, AMS, CPH, BCN, FCO, MXP” to see where the cheapest flight is from Chicago to either London, Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Rome, or Milan.
• Some cities with multiple airports have city codes. These include NYC (New York City) or WAS (Washington DC), which count for three each because NYC = JFK, LGA, EWR, and WAS = DCA, IAD, BWI.

How to select dates in Google Flights to see the cheapest day to fly

In order to find the cheapest travel dates, click the departure date box. When you do that, prices for 2 months will pop up, with the cheapest dates in green, like so:

Two important notes:

• A Google flight search only takes into account prices in the months you’ve told it to look at. So in the above example, the green dates are the lowest in May and June, but you may be able to save money by finding cheaper dates if you scroll to an earlier or later time frame.
• The cheap green dates are only for whatever length of trip you initially specified. I originally searched for a 7-day trip, but switching the length of the trip—as seen in the red box above—can often result in wildly different fares. (Pro-tip: It’s quite common to see fares drop significantly when switching from a 6-day trip to a 7-day trip. That’s because the fine print on international flights often mandates that the cheapest fares only be available for trips of at least 7 days.)

Once you’ve looked at the calendar of lowest fares, click on the dates you want and you’ll get a big list of possible flights, like so:

Notice that Google Flights lists a few up top that they consider to be the “Best departing flights” taking into account factors like price and routing. It can still be worth taking a look at the “Other departing flights” to find the best flights for your schedule.

All flight times on Google Flights are shown in local time. If you notice a +1 next to the arrival time listed, on a Google Flights itinerary, it means your flight arrives the next day (or 2 days later if it says +2).

How to book flights on Google Flights

Once you’ve decided on a good departure flight, click on it. You’ll then be prompted to choose a corresponding return flight (assuming you’re booking a roundtrip fare), and your screen will look like this:

If you want to go back and change the departure flight, all you do in the above example is click where it says “EWR-ORY” on the left just above “Returning flights.”

Three quick things to be aware of:

• The price Google Flights shows includes all taxes but not optional fees (like seat selection or bags if they’re not included).
• If you've searched for a roundtrip itinerary, the price displayed by Google Flights will be the cost for the entire roundtrip.
• Google Flights isn't an online travel agency (OTA); it's a flight search engine. That means Google Flights doesn’t actually sell you flights. Instead, when you’ve chosen your flight, it gives you links so you can book with an online travel agency or directly with the airline. (With some airlines, you’ll have the option to “Book on Google with [airline],” which is really just a fancy way of Google transmitting your information and payment to the airline.)

Once you click your preferred return flight, you’ll be shown your booking options, like so:

Many airlines have different economy ticket types. The two most common are basic economy and main economy (or similar names). Google Flights will give you information on the different perks and restrictions between different economy tickets, like so:

What to do when cheap flights can't be booked through the Google Flights page ("Ghosting")

On occasion, Google Flights will initially tell you a cheap fare is available, but when you try to book the ticket, the fare either jumps in price or is unable to be booked altogether.

We refer to this as “ghosting.”

This happens on rare occasions because the airline may have just changed the fare, but the new price hasn’t yet filtered through to the search results.

If Google Flights tells you the only way to get the cheap price is to call the airline, don’t bother. It won’t work because the airline has already repriced the fare. Shed a tear for the great fare that got away, and hope for better luck with the next one.

If you see a fare that’s ghosting, there are a couple of ways to check if it’s truly gone:

• Try other dates in Google Flights. Maybe the airline has repriced May 2-9, but the cheap fare is still available for May 3-10.
• Take the dates of a ghosting fare and see if it can be booked in an online travel agency like Priceline or Expedia.

Keep your hopes tempered though—airfare can move fast and when a great fare ghosts, the likelihood it can still be booked are low. 

How to use Google Flights Explore map view

You’ve been working hard—all you can think of is a fruity cocktail with a little umbrella in the sand. It doesn’t really matter which beach, you just want a cheap flight and warm sun.

You could spend 30 minutes searching dozens of airports in the Caribbean.

Or, you can use one of the most handy (and hidden!) features of Google Flights to search flights in 10 seconds: the Explore map.

The Explore map shows you fares on specific (or flexible) dates across a country or entire region.

There are two ways to reach the Explore map.

• Do a normal Google Flights search but instead of an airport in the destination, put in a country, region, or continent then click the blue Explore button like so:

• Alternatively, click the Explore button along the top.

With either method, Google Flights will switch to a map view like this (You can zoom in anywhere on the map to see more fares):

If you’ve got the wiggle room in your schedule, you can find even cheaper fares by switching to “Flexible dates”.

You’ll then have the option to pick which months to travel (or search anytime in the next 6 months), and choose trip lengths of a weekend, 1 week, or 2 weeks.

You can filter results on the Google Explore map to narrow down your search results. At the top, filter by number of stops, airlines, travel times, and flight duration, or indicate your number of bags to see prices that include bag fees. You can also move the slider in the Price section to indicate the maximum amount that you would be willing to spend for your flight; all itineraries over that amount will be removed from the search results.

How to filter results in Google Flights to find your perfect flight

One of Google Flights’ most powerful features is the ability to set an array of filters to ensure you only get flight schedules you’re interested in.

These include:

• Note #1: You can choose multiple airlines or even an airline alliance like SkyTeam
• Note #2: You can exclude certain airlines (Spirit, ahem) by un-selecting their checkbox like so:  

• Note: This filter lets you see the total price, including carry-on and/or checked baggage. (From experience, including checked baggage in the price is only available on domestic flights, for some reason. Hopefully this changes.)
• Tip: This filter is especially useful when using the Explore map because you can set a price ceiling (say, $600) and see all the sub-$600 flight options in Europe on your travel dates. (Remember, the options beneath your price ceiling can change drastically by changing dates, even by a day or two.)
• For if you want to take off or land at certain times 
• This calculation takes into account your seating class, flight route, and aircraft type. For instance, an economy ticket for a nonstop flight on a newer plane will have fewer emissions than a business class ticket for a connecting flight on an older plane.

Connecting airports

• Tip: There’s a hidden but very useful tool in here: layover duration. This helps you weed out flights with those ghastly 9-hour layovers.  

• Think of this one as Total Travel Time. If you’ve got a connection, this filter helps filter out-of-the-way layovers and/or long layover times. (Nonstop flights are all about the same length, of course.)

How to track flight prices on Google Flights  

You can set fare alerts on Google Flights to make sure you don't miss a great deal. There are three situations this can be especially helpful:

• You’re looking at a specific flight and want to know if/when the price changes.
• You’re looking to travel on specific dates and want to know when prices change on any flight. 
• You’re looking to fly somewhere specific and want to know when prices change on any date.

To start, set your departure and destination cities and your dates. On the results page, look for the "Track prices" button and click it so it toggles on and turns blue. (If you're not signed in to Google, you'll be prompted to do so.)

• Tip: Set any filters (say, nonstop flights only or excluding Spirit Airlines) before clicking to track prices. That way Google will only notify you about price changes on the flights you’re actually interested in.

Once you've clicked the button to track flights, you'll see a small box at the bottom of the page where you can "View all" to see all of your tracked flight prices. (Alternatively, you can go to https://www.google.com/travel/flights/saves to see all the flights you’re currently tracking.) You'll get an email whenever the price changes.

A few drawbacks to be aware of:

• You may end up getting a lot of email notifications, as flight prices can change quite a bit from day to day.
• You can’t set the alert to only notify you if the cost reaches a particular threshold.
• You won’t be notified about great deals out of your home airport to other destinations (even nearby ones). That’s what Going is for!

How to book multi-city tickets on Google Flights

Booking multi-city or open-jaw tickets on Google Flights is easy. On the home screen, look to the far left where it says "round trip" and click the drop down menu. Select "multi-city."

Now input your dates and travel cities as you usually would. You can add up to five flights.

Tip: If you want to visit multiple cities on an international trip, it’s almost always cheaper to book an open-jaw multi-city flight than to book separate one-way flights. (On long-haul flights, many airlines charge nearly the same price for one-ways as they do for roundtrip or multi-city flights.) For example, if you want to visit Paris and Rome, you’ll get the cheapest fare by searching for a multi-city flight—your home airport to Paris, then Rome back to your home airport. Once you’ve booked the transoceanic legs, book a separate flight from Paris to Rome. You’ll save hundreds with this method compared to booking three one-way flights or a single, three-leg itinerary.

How to tell if you've found a good deal on Google Flights

One fun feature is that Google Flights will give you a sense of whether or not current fares are a good deal.

Take a roundtrip flight from New York to Paris December 2-9. According to Google Flights, the current $431 price is low, and $299 is cheaper than usual. You’ll also see a chart showing how prices have changed on that route over the past few months.

Take these results with a grain of salt. Their advice on what flights “usually” cost can skew high. They currently advise that $1,050 for off-peak NYC-Paris flights would be typical, which is certainly not advice I would give. ($750 would be the upper bound of what I’d consider a “normal” price here.) Instead, think of their price bands as a loose indicator of how current prices compare.

How to use the “Date grid” to find cheaper fares on Google Flights

Say you want to fly from New York to Germany for Oktoberfest. You know to search multiple German destinations (FRA, MUC, BER, DUS, HAM, etc.) to easily find the cheapest fare. But the results Google Flights show you are only for the dates you chose, say September 20-27.

This is where the “Date grid” comes in handy. Compared to the calendar of cheap fares, the date grid is useful because it will also show you fares on trips of different lengths. In this case, I can see that fares are $221 cheaper by flying September 20-28 rather than September 20-27.

You can find the Date grid just underneath the flight dates. (Google Flights will often have a small-pop as seen below when there’s a substantial price drop by adjusting your travel dates by just a day or two.)

Advanced tips for using Google Flights

Tip #1: search multiple airports to find the cheapest route between two regions.

With Google Flights you can search multiple airports by inputting up to seven departure and destination airport codes.

Why would you want to do that? Well, let’s say you want to fly from Los Angeles to anywhere in Japan for plum blossom season (a hidden gem compared to popular cherry blossom season!). You can put in Los Angeles’ airport codes (LAX, SNA, LGB, ONT, BUR, plus perhaps SFO and SJC to see if the savings would be worth it) and then add the destination codes for multiple airports in Japan (NRT, HND, KIX, NGO, FUK, OKA, CTS) to easily find which one is the cheapest for your February 17-24 trip.

The results will automatically list the best deal at the top. In this case, it’s nonstop LAX to Tokyo (NRT) for $630 roundtrip.

Tip #2: Use the Explore Map to find the cheapest places for flexible dates

Say you have a slightly different situation than the one outlined above. You just want to go somewhere, and your dates are pretty open. Click the “Explore” button at the top (or just go to https://www.google.com/travel/explore ).

From there you’ll be shown a map that highlights the cheapest destinations from your home airport for a 1-week trip in the next 6 months. If you want to narrow things down, click the date box to choose a trip length (weekend, 1 week, or 2 weeks) and/or a specific month sometime in the next six months.

This option is especially useful for folks who have quite a bit of flexibility on where and when they travel and just want to get as good a deal as possible on airfare.

• Tip: Remember that flight prices are constantly changing! It’s the most volatile thing we buy. The prices you see today on the Explore map could look wildly different tomorrow.

For example, if you live in Houston and want to take a trip to Europe sometime in the next 6 months, the Explore map would quickly show you prices all over the continent.

• Tip: Use the price filter to set a ceiling and see all your options under any price, say $650, like so:

Tip #3: Use the calendar, date grid, and price graph to find the cheapest dates for a specific destination

Once you have a destination, Google Flights gives you a lot of options for playing around with dates to find the cheapest airfare possible.

When you input your dates, the calendar feature will pop up and show you two months of prices. You’ll see the cheapest dates highlighted in green. If you click the arrows to the right of the calendar view, you’ll see what’s available in the coming months. Here’s Atlanta to Denver in autumn 2023:

• Tip: The calendar of cheapest fares will take into account any filters you may have selected. If you want to avoid budget airlines, for instance, un-selecting Frontier and Spirit will update the fares shown in the calendar.

Meanwhile, the date grid will show you the cheapest fares for different length trips across different dates. Anything cheaper than your selected flight is highlighted in green. If you click the arrows at the top of the grid, you’ll see more dates.

The price graph works in the same way but shows two months of fares in bar chart form. I’ll level with you: Using the calendar and date grid is simpler and more intuitive than using the price graph. Your mileage may vary!

‍ Tip #4: Get the “Legroom for Google Flights” Chrome extension

Cheap flights are great, but they’ve still gotta be good flights. The Chrome extension Legroom for Google Flights helps by showing you right in the search results how many inches of legroom you’ll have on each flight. (Average legroom on US domestic flights is 30-31 inches—this extension will highlight in green if there’s more or red if there’s less.)

Here’s what it looks like when you search for a flight from Boston to Miami:

Is four extra inches of legroom on JetBlue worth $45 more than Spirit? You decide!

Getting a refund on flights booked through Google Flights

Because Google Flights is a search engine and the flights are actually booked directly with the airline, refunds are up to each airline's policy.

In the United States, the Department of Transportation's " 24-hour rule " ensures that you can cancel your flight within 24 hours of ticket purchase and get a full refund. The rule applies to any flight departing from a US airport, so long as the ticket was booked directly with the airline, and it was booked at least 7 days before departure.

Google Flights Price Guarantee

On certain flights, Google Flights will actually pay you the difference if the price drops after you book. (This is their way of expressing confidence that the current price is quite unlikely to go any lower.)

There are a number of restrictions (full terms and conditions here ), but here are a few important ones to know:

• The price guarantee is only available when you see a price badge next to the fare, like so:

• You don’t have to pay for price guarantee
• There’s not even any enrollment required; the only thing you have to do to be eligible is book the ticket on Google Flights, like so:

• You don’t have to do anything after booking. Google automatically monitors for price drops and refunds you the difference
• You’ll get any fare difference refunded via Google Pay within 48 hours after your flight  

Which airlines are listed on Google Flights? 

The vast majority of airlines are listed on Google Flights, including: 

• British Airways
• China Southern
• Qatar Airways
• Singapore Airlines
• Turkish Airlines
• and many, many more

Which airlines are not listed on Google Flights? 

The primary omission in the US is Southwest Airlines flights. Southwest only sells tickets directly via their website and intentionally does not sell them through online travel agencies.

Funny enough, Google Flights does show you the listing for Southwest flights; it just doesn’t show the price. To see the fare, you’ll have to check Southwest.com.

How to change your currency, language, or location on Google Flights

In the top left-hand corner of Google Flights, look for the "hamburger"—the three horizontal lines to the left of the "Google" logo.

This opens up a vertical menu on the left-hand side. At the bottom of this, there are options to change the language, currency, or location you use for Google Flights.

How to find flights with lower carbon emissions on Google Flights

Google Flights now shows the approximate carbon footprint of most flights. Generally, nonstop flights have lower carbon emissions than itineraries with connections, but even within nonstop routes, emissions rates can vary by aircraft type.

In addition to giving the emission rate for your flight, Google Flights also tells you what the average rate is for that route and if your rate is higher or lower. Note that the rate also takes into account your fare class; a higher rate of emissions is generally attributed to business class tickets because the larger seats mean fewer people on the plane, so each seat has a larger share of responsibility.

How to use Going and Google Flights together

Every time we send our members a deal, we include a link to sample search, and 99% of the time, it's on Google Flights because bottom line: Google Flights often has what you're looking for.

The sample search will be pre-filled out with the departure city and arrival airports, plus filters like specific airlines, number of stops, and layover times. This makes it easy for you to narrow in on the flights included in the deal. Often, the deal is available from several cities and hundreds of date combinations, so you can update the departure airport and play around with various dates to see what works for you.

Frequently Asked Questions About Google Flights

Founder & Chief Flight Expert

Published December 5, 2023

Last updated March 28, 2024

Articles you might like

How to Find Cheap Flights in 2024: The Ultimate Guide

Apr 8, 2024

Why Are Flights So Expensive Right Now?

Apr 2, 2024

10 Flight Booking Hacks to Score Cheap Flights and Travel for Less

Apr 1, 2024

How to use Google Flights to find cheap flights and maximize your next travel booking

Google Flights is constantly evolving, and it's the one tool I always mention when people ask me how to find better flight prices.

This easy-to-use website can help you find the best possible price on airfare (and even hotels). It's one of the biggest weapons in our arsenal at TPG to help save money on travel. While TPG does offer deal alerts , if you are looking for a particular flight, destination, airline or routing, Google Flights is the way to find personalized deals.

Google Flights is where I almost always begin my search for new bookings. I come back to it again and again to book trips, see if prices have dropped and check if I can get a better deal.

Here's everything you need to know to use and master Google Flights.

What is Google Flights?

Google Flights is one of our favorite tools for finding deals on flights. It's an amazingly powerful flight search engine, and the best part is that it's easy to use. Google shows you nearly all available flights for a given search but doesn't force you to book with it.

Unlike Expedia, Orbitz, Tripadvisor or Kayak, it's not an online travel agency. Google is simply showing you what's available. Once you find the flights you like, you "click through" to actually book. You can choose to book directly with the airline or via a third-party OTA, but not Google itself.

One frustrating note is that Google Flights does not show Southwest Airlines flights, so keep that in mind as you search.

What's new at Google Flights?

Google has introduced new features that suggest when prices are historically lowest and when you should book for maximum savings. Google has always shown whether the price for a suggested flight itinerary is typical, low or high, but now it gives you even more data to consider.

The tool will "let travelers know when airfares are expected to be lowest for booking their chosen dates and destination," according to Craig Ewer, who works in communications at Google.

For example, when I searched last year, Google showed me that a flight from New York to San Francisco in October was $93 cheaper than usual, and the typical range is between $245 and $415. In other words, it was a good time to book.

It gets even better: In some situations, Google will suggest alternate dates you should actually book the flight to save a few bucks. The example below shows that a December flight to Miami would have been much cheaper if I had waited to book it until Sept. 13.

Here's a final example. I apparently waited too long to book my flight home for Christmas a few months ago.

Basics of Google Flights

How to perform a basic flight search.

First, you'll want to navigate to Google Flights .

The toolbar has additional features for trips, including things to do, hotels, vacation rentals and a shortcut to a cool tool called "Explore." However, we'll focus on using the tool to book flights for now.

All of the fields and drop-down menus on this page are relatively easy to decipher:

• Departure (where you want to fly from)
• Destination (where you want to fly to)
• Date(s) of travel
• Round-trip flights, one-way flights or multicity trips
• The number of passengers (but here's why you should search for a single ticket , even if you're traveling in a group)
• Ticket class: economy, premium economy, business class or first class

If you know where you're going and when you want to be there, all you have to do is plug in that information and hit the blue search button.

For example, here are all the options I see when I search for flights from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) to San Francisco International Airport (SFO). You can search by destination or by airport code.

Note that Google automatically displays what it considers the best departing flights based on a combination of factors, such as price, the convenience of routing, the number of stops and the travel time. Of course, these may or may not be the best flights for you.

In this case, there are hundreds of options to choose from.

For this example, I chose to book an American Airlines flight on my outbound trip.

The cheapest option is sometimes to fly the return on a different carrier. However, Google Flights clearly indicates there will be two tickets purchased separately.

Often, Google will suggest remaining on the same carrier for both legs. In this instance, one of the flights was on JetBlue.

There are all kinds of ways to filter your searches. We'll get a bit more into that below.

Once you've found the flight you want, you have the option to book directly with American Airlines. Google will give you several options for the type of ticket you want to purchase, including basic economy, refundable and other types of fares.

Clicking that link would take me to American's website , with these flights and prices already selected. There, I could enter my passenger details and loyalty number, select a seat and pay for the ticket.

All elite perks and other loyalty benefits are honored on flights booked directly on the airline website via Google Flights. However, if you are booking via a third-party site, that may not be the case. It pays to make sure you book directly with the airline if possible.

In this example, the cheapest option is for mixed tickets with multiple stops. Most people are not going to want to take that option. It involves booking through a third-party website with tickets on different airlines and multiple flights and layovers. No thanks.

Related: 9 things to consider when choosing to book via a portal vs. booking directly

Below is an example of Google Flights' handy historical price guide, which shows whether the fare you found is low, high or near the average price for flights on this route.

I can see the flights were more than $600 a few months ago, and my $442 fare was considered low. Given how expensive airfare generally is these days , I was happy enough with that.

The bottom of this screenshot also shows the options available at the bottom of each Google Flights page, where you can select your preferred language from a drop-down menu. You can also customize your location and preferred currency for easy conversion.

Search by specific times of day

Say you want to take a weekend trip away. You need both flights to be outside business hours but not too late in the evening, as you don't want to land in the middle of the night.

Google Flights has a handy filter we use to make sure the flights are exactly when we want them. No matter how inexpensive that 6 a.m. flight may be, a 3:30 a.m. wake-up call rarely feels worth it.

So, you can set the search results to only show flights departing and arriving within your chosen specific time range.

See how many bags you can bring on board

In the same series of buttons below your Google Flight search, click on the "Bags" button to specify how many pieces of luggage you want to bring on board with you.

This selection may greatly limit your search results — or drive up your price options — so be prepared to change it if necessary.

Nonstop, one-stop or any flight will do?

Similarly, you can filter flights by the number of stops along the way. You might be the glutton for punishment who longs for a 50-plus-hour flight with multiple layovers. You can do that if you so desire.

However, if you want to minimize the chance of delays or disruptions, have a family to rush back to or just want a shorter flight, nonstop is your friend. Headed overseas? The usual sweet spot between price and comfort will be a one-stop flight.

Search for flights from your preferred airline or alliance

If you don't fly often, the operating airline may not matter to you as much as the price does.

However, if you've begun accumulating miles and status with a specific carrier, it can be addictive to stick with that carrier and program. The exclusive benefits of elite status can be exhilarating, and there's nothing more exciting than booking your first award flight — especially if you know you got an amazing deal.

Related: What are airline alliances, and who's in them?

With filtered airline search results, Google can help you keep that momentum going. Use the button under the search results to filter out unwanted airlines or select specific airline alliances you want to patronize. Or, turn off the "Select all airlines" option and manually select the carriers you want to choose from.

Whether booking with cash or points, you may want to stick with one program to maximize mileage earning or status. For example, if I were trying to hit Diamond on Delta Air Lines, I would search only for Delta flights.

You can also pick airline alliances like Oneworld and SkyTeam to ensure you travel on your preferred airline or its partners. In my case, I would select SkyTeam.

Connecting flights

You can also decide if you want to fly nonstop or choose how many stops you are willing to make. You can even choose the connecting airport.

Especially with international flights, some airports are better to connect in than others. Helsinki Airport (HEL) is lovely. Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport (CDG) and Amsterdam Airport Schiphol (AMS) can be challenging , even if you are an experienced traveler.

Related: What are the best European airports to connect in?

If you have a range of options to travel from New York to Rome Fiumicino Leonardo da Vinci Airport (FCO) with a choice of connecting airports, you can filter the results to only show the airports you want to connect through.

You can also choose how long you would like your layover to extend. You might want to keep it short to reach your destination as quickly as possible. Or, you may prefer a long layover to allow for some buffer time in the event of delays.

Related: How to plan a free stopover on your next trip abroad

Score the best legroom and other seat amenities

Don't you hate boarding a flight to find your knees touching the back of the seat in front of you? Fortunately, Google Flights has a feature that will show you the legroom you can expect on your next flight before you have purchased the seat.

Legroom can differ noticeably from carrier to carrier, aircraft type to aircraft type. From the search results below, you can see that Spirit Airlines' is below the industry average at 28 inches, while JetBlue's is above average at 32 inches.

If you value legroom, this means the JetBlue option will have 4 inches more legroom than Spirit.

In coach seating terms, that's a lot.

Along with legroom, Google Flights will also indicate if Wi-Fi is scheduled to be available on your flight (and if it is free or available at a cost), if the plane has in-seat charging options, and if the flight offers entertainment like live TV or options to stream to your personal device.

On a flight longer than five hours, your devices may run out of juice. So, again, you may want to choose the product that best suits your needs rather than selecting a flight based entirely on price or carrier.

Know your emissions

With sustainability becoming an increasingly important topic in travel , Google Flights will let you know the approximate carbon emissions for your flight based on the route, aircraft type and seating classes.

Below are the search results for a flight from Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) to Tokyo's Narita International Airport (NRT). United Airlines operates a fuel-efficient Boeing 787 on this route, which would produce a lower-than-average 734 kilograms of carbon dioxide.

However, the Singapore Airlines flight uses a less fuel-efficient (and larger) Boeing 777 aircraft that produces a higher-than-average 1,163 kilograms of carbon dioxide.

You can even filter your search results only to show lower-emissions flight options.

How to search by cheapest dates

Let's say I want to get from JFK to LAX in September, but I'm not tied to any specific dates. Google Flights can help me find the best possible prices for that trip.

On the search page, I can see the lowest price for that particular day if I click on the calendar icon. Prices listed in green represent the lowest price available across all current dates, while the days highlighted in blue show which dates I've selected.

Another way to view the cheapest dates is to click the date grid option. This will again show the cheapest dates in green, and you can easily line up different outbound and inbound options to see if the cheapest dates work for you.

You'll often find that the cheapest flight isn't necessarily the best or most convenient route. Google will show you those lowest prices but prioritize better routes before it.

In this example, Google Flights prioritizes slightly higher fares as the "best flights" search results because they include a full-size carry-on bag.

How to set a pricing alert for yourself

After all that diligent work, give yourself a pat on the back. You've likely found the best option for you.

Some people are ready to book immediately, but most of us might need a day or two to solidify our plans with our fellow travelers or with work. Never fear: Google will help you track your flight and even tell you when the price goes up or down.

Immediately above your search results, a little toggle reads "Track prices" (boxed in green in the screenshot above).

Click on that — and log in to your Google account if necessary — and Google Flights will send updated pricing alerts directly into your inbox.

If you have booked a refundable or changeable fare, you may want to switch this on even after you've booked. You will be alerted if the price goes up or down, so you can feel comfortable knowing you are getting the best deal. You can see part of my list of flights I'm currently tracking in the screenshot below.

Related: How to avoid airline change and cancellation fees

How to search multiple airports at once

Sometimes, you're willing to land or depart a bit farther away in order to find a better flight deal. Google Flights can help reward that flexibility. In fact, you can enter as many as five departure or arrival airports on Google Flights.

Let's say you live in New York City, where you have three major airports from which to choose. You want to fly to Southern California, which is easily accessible from multiple airports as well.

There are two ways to run this search:

• Type in your city name and let Google offer suggestions: This works for many major metro areas. As soon as I type in New York, I see several of the major airports: Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR), LaGuardia Airport (LGA) and JFK. Sometimes, you'll even see New York Stewart International Airport (SWF) in Newburgh, about 60 miles north of Manhattan, as an option.
• Manually type in your airport codes or names : Some cities won't show you all the logical potential airports. For Southern California, you will have to manually type in the names or codes of each airport in the area for some searches. (Don't forget San Diego International Airport [SAN] as a potential option.)

You can open a separate browser tab and look up local airports by name. Or, if you're a pro and know the codes, you can type them directly into the destination airport search field (i.e., LAX, SNA, BUR, ONT). Then, hit the blue check to run the search.

Voila: The cheapest option for March 18-25 is taking a nonstop, round-trip flight from EWR to LAX for $258 in United basic economy.

How to check for carry-on bag policies

I don't care what anyone says: Low-cost carriers can be fantastic for finding great deals.

However, if you're a heavy packer, you'll need to plan ahead. Many airlines cut costs by charging extra for bags. You're used to this with major airlines, but some ultra-low-cost airlines will even charge you for carry-ons larger than a backpack or a purse .

It can be difficult to track which airlines charge what, but Google Flights can also help with that.

Basic economy flights will show on the search results page, with the little "no luggage" icon next to the $247 price tag in green.

When I click through to the final booking page, Google will remind me again that I'm booking a basic economy flight; it'll show my current price and its limitations while also displaying economy and first-class booking options next to it.

Remember: Google Flights doesn't work with Southwest Airlines

One important caveat: You might wonder why you don't see any Southwest flights on Google Flights.

Well, you might see them, like with this search result for Austin to Las Vegas:

However, Southwest doesn't allow other travel platforms to book flights with the airline — it wants to control its passengers' booking process completely. So, if you're a Southwest fan, check the airline's website or app for price comparison before you book with another carrier through Google Flights.

Organize your travel

There's a "Travel" button on the toolbar of Google Flights.

It will display the travel you have already booked. When you click on the trip, it neatly shows travel booked through your Google account, such as those reservation emails sent to a Gmail account.

It will also show "potential trips." This is where you may have been searching Google Flights for a particular destination but have not yet bought the ticket. Additionally, it will provide suggestions based on what destinations you've Googled in general.

Perhaps you have searched for " When is the best time to visit Hawaii ?" Google Flights may show you suggestions to help you continue planning that trip.

Finally, the "Travel" button will suggest trips you might consider taking based on upcoming trips you have booked or trips you've taken in the past.

For example, if you've been to Melbourne, Australia, it may show options to visit Sydney.

Related: The best ways to use points and miles to fly from the US to Australia

How to find the best getaway deal

This function is similar to the previous tip but focuses on another aspect of your search. Start by clicking the "Explore" button on the toolbar.

If you know you want to get away on specific dates — let's say the second week of October — but don't have a specific destination in mind, use Google's open-ended search functionality to find good flight deals within your window of availability.

In the example below, I picked a long weekend in October and set my hometown of New York as my departure airport. Instead of specifying a destination, I just left it open-ended. You can give Google a hint by typing "Europe" or "Caribbean" to narrow your search results to a specific region.

Related: 9 awesome features you didn't know about in Google Flights

If I zoom in closer on the map, the system recalibrates and shows me more destinations and price points within the updated map view.

If I zoom way out for a world view, I'll see the best-priced destinations of note across the globe.

I can also force the algorithm to show me price points for a specific region.

For example, the world map above doesn't show me many deals for Australia, South America or Africa. However, if I zoom in on Africa, I see more than half a dozen options on the continent and more than a dozen in "surrounding" areas.

Related: Safaris, cities and lots of elephants: How I returned to South Africa using points, miles and cash

Bottom line

Google Flights is an incredibly powerful tool the TPG team uses daily to price airfare . It can help you quickly find the best flights for your travel, but it can also track prices and let you know if you are getting a good deal. It can also help you plan trips and find hotels and activities.

It's one of my favorite tools to find deals and new places to visit. Add it to your travel toolbox. I promise it will become one of your favorites, too.

Related reading:

• Key travel tips you need to know — whether you're a beginner or expert traveler
• The best travel credit cards
• The 18 best places to travel in 2023
• 6 real-life strategies you can use when your flight is canceled or delayed
• 8 of the best credit cards for general travel purchases
• 13 must-have items the TPG team can't travel without

Advertiser Disclosure

Many of the credit card offers that appear on this site are from credit card companies from which we receive financial compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site (including, for example, the order in which they appear). However, the credit card information that we publish has been written and evaluated by experts who know these products inside out. We only recommend products we either use ourselves or endorse. This site does not include all credit card companies or all available credit card offers that are on the market. See our advertising policy here where we list advertisers that we work with, and how we make money. You can also review our credit card rating methodology .

How To Use Google Flights To Find Cheap Prices, Discover Destinations (& More)

Michael McHugh

Former Content Contributor

63 Published Articles

Countries Visited: 15 U.S. States Visited: 32

Keri Stooksbury

Editor-in-Chief

34 Published Articles 3151 Edited Articles

Countries Visited: 47 U.S. States Visited: 28

Price Guarantee

Track travel advisories and restrictions, new and improved explore feature, search multiple cities, search multiple dates, price graph, how to book a flight, tracking prices, explore destinations with places, explore destinations with dates, explore destinations with price, selecting the flight, best ways to use explore destinations, vacation rentals, google flights price guarantee, google travel itineraries, google travel recommendations, flight delay notification and prediction, overhead bin access, enhanced by legroom (google chrome extension), final thoughts.

We may be compensated when you click on product links, such as credit cards, from one or more of our advertising partners. Terms apply to the offers below. See our Advertising Policy for more about our partners, how we make money, and our rating methodology. Opinions and recommendations are ours alone.

Before the Google Flights platform launched in 2011, the process to search for all of your travel needs across a variety of websites was extremely cumbersome. Today, Google Flights has everything you need in 1 place to easily plan travel — it’s a robust website that helps you evaluate all of your Trip, Flight, Hotel, and Travel Package options.

In true Google fashion, the Google Flights platform is once again pushing the envelope with its price guarantee function, which we dive into below. In addition to its price guarantee function, Google added a feature that allows you to see your travel itinerary/itineraries on google.com/travel when logged into your Google account. Additional features include hotels, restaurants, and things to do recommendations from Google based on your destination.

New Features for Google Flights

Google Flights has recently added a new feature that gives users the ability to guarantee the lowest price possible.

When the multicolored guarantee badge appears, it means that Google is very confident that the price won’t get any higher before you fly. If a guaranteed price does go up, you can get an automatic refund of the price difference through Google Pay.

One of the newer features of Google Flights that is especially helpful in today’s climate is the ability to view and track any COVID-19 travel advisories or restrictions for the destination you’re searching for. This will include details like whether you’ll need to quarantine upon arrival or provide proof of test results or immunization records.

Better yet, you can also track these advisories and receive updates straight to your inbox. So if restrictions are added, lifted, or reduced, you will know about it right away and can make adjustments to your travels as necessary.

Those who have been using Google Flights for a while know that the Google Explore feature used to just show flight prices to a variety of major destinations from your home airport.

But now, you’ll see significantly more destinations on the map, including smaller cities and national parks, hotel rates, info on tours, activities, and attractions. You can also filter destinations that appear based on your interests (outdoors, beaches, skiing), the duration of the trip, the airlines that fly there, and more.

How Google Flights Can Save You Money

The first thing you might notice is that Google Flights isn’t quite as flashy as some of the online travel agencies like Expedia , Priceline , or Orbitz . Have no fear — it’s still a powerful search engine with lots of options!

Start by entering your basic search criteria, just as you would on any other site. Google Flights allows you to do multiple searches at once — up to 7 departures and 7 destinations in the search box! — saving you tons of time when you are doing a flexible search.

As an example, let’s say you want to fly from New York City to Europe but without a specific city in mind. In the departure box you can enter New York City, which will search all of the New York airports (LGA, JFK, EWR) — or you can select the airports individually, including other nearby airports like Islip, Long Island (ISP) or Philadelphia (PHL).

For your destination city, start typing in cities you are interested in visiting like Paris (CDG), Barcelona (BCN), Berlin (BER), etc. Google Flights will search for the best options all at once, instead of looking up the price of each route individually !

Your results list will display options including all of the cities added to your search. In the example below, we can see the cheapest flight is a nonstop flight from New York (JFK) to Paris (CDG).

Bottom Line:  If you have some flexibility in your travel plans or don’t know exactly where you want to go, Google Flights can save tons of time by combining multiple searches into 1. You can input up to 7 departure cities and 7 destination cities all in 1 search to see, quickly and easily, what the cheapest option will be. 

You now know you can search multiple departure and arrival cities, but how can you find out the cheapest dates to fly?

After inputting your departure and arrival cities, look at the dates to the right side of the search box. Clicking the calendar icon will display a calendar view showing prices for the whole month. Days that offer lower prices will be shown in green. As you can see, the majority of dates for this route in September and October have pricing for business class in green.

Hot Tip: You can adjust the duration of your trip by using the arrows at each side of the calendar box.

Flight Insights

Google Flights has updated its Flight Insights section, found on the right side above your flight search results. A new Prices section is shown below your search results . With this new format, you’ll only see the Prices section when searching between 2 city pairs and not when searching for multiple destinations.

Hot Tip: We always use a rewards card that earns bonus points   on travel purchases. For example, the Chase Sapphire Preferred ® Card earns you 2 points for every $1 that you spend with the card on travel or dining purchases. If you’re a business owner, we’d strongly recommend using a rewarding business credit card (we recommend Chase business credit cards ) when making a travel purchase, otherwise, you’re missing out on points, miles, or cash-back!

For deeper insight on the cheapest days to fly, click on the Date Grid . This will open up a grid showing the cheapest days to fly in green and the most expensive days to fly in red.

You can see even more pricing details by using the Departure and Return arrows on the top and right side of the Date Grid section respectively. For those with flexible travel dates, this can be a great way to save some cash!

The Price graph shows 2 months’ worth of prices in a visual graph form to easily see price trends by day. Scroll further in the future with the arrow to the right of the graph or change the duration of your trip using the -/+ buttons by your selected dates.

How To Use Google Flights

Although this tool lets you search for, compare, and purchase flights, it’s not technically an online travel agency like Travelocity or Priceline . Rather, it’s a highly effective metasearch engine that saves you the step of searching each airline and website individually.

Scroll through the Best Departing Flights results and click on a flight that interests you. Flights listed in the Other Departing Flights section will typically be more expensive and/or include less than ideal layovers.

When you find the flight you want, you’re prompted to choose your outbound flight first, followed by your return flight (assuming you’re booking a round-trip flight). Keep in mind that the price shown on the initial results screen is the lowest possible price for that itinerary. The return flight you pick could alter the cost, so make sure to pay attention to the prices of each return flight.

When you’ve chosen your flights, Google offers a few options for booking — generally, these are the cheapest options it can find. You’re given the option to book directly with the airline operating the flight (often cheapest), through the airline’s partners, or with whichever online travel agencies offer the best deals.

Click the Select button next to the price of your flight and you’ll be redirected to that website to book your flight. The travel details are already set, so all you need to do is confirm them, enter your personal information, and pay.

Bottom Line:  While the other features that Google Flights offers are useful, its basic flight search functionality is the heart and soul of this tool. It’s not quite perfect and doesn’t have full access to every airline — for example, it can’t access prices for Southwest Airlines — but otherwise, it’s the best way there is to search for flights.

Google has a tool that lets you track flight prices — once set, you’ll receive an email if prices increase or decrease. To set an alert, look above the booking sites after you’ve chosen an itinerary and click the Track Prices button. If you’re logged in to Google, the alerts will be sent to your Gmail; otherwise, enter an email address.

You can access any flight price alert set by clicking on the 3-line menu icon in the upper-left corner of Google Flights and clicking Tracked Flight Prices . You can also see a graph with price changes from the day you set the price alert going forward.

Google also has an option to share a chosen itinerary before actually booking the flight. This tool can be extremely helpful when searching for flights for someone else or making group travel plans.

The Share button is directly above the Total Price of your flight with 2 options for sharing — 1) email the itinerary to yourself, or 2) share the itinerary with another person.

To email the itinerary to yourself, click the Send To Yourself button on the left. Similar to the Track Prices feature, the itinerary will be sent to your Gmail if you’re logged into your account, otherwise, you’ll need to enter your email address for the itinerary to be emailed to you.

To share the itinerary with another person, click the Share button on the right. A window pops up with options to share via Email, Facebook, Twitter, or Copy Link.

Bottom Line:  Google Flights is one of the most effective ways to search for flights. The platform has powerful tools to help make the flight search process easier than it otherwise would be. 

Explore Destinations

On the Google Flights homepage, you’ll notice an Explore Destinations button directly below the area where you select the dates of your travel. This tool is very interesting because it’s the perfect way to find some travel inspiration! There are 3 main ways you can search: Place, Date, and Price.

The Explore Destinations Places section lets you input a place that you’d like to travel, and then populates a map on the right side of the page with markers showing the different places that you can go. You can scroll through the search list under the Price section or search destinations directly on the map.

Another way that you can use Explore Destinations is to search for potential trips by Date. Enter Specific Dates or Flexible Dates and the Explore Destinations map will update the results based on these filters. Similar to Places, when the search results are populated, you can scroll through the list of destinations on the left side or click the destination directly on the map.

If Price is your filter of choice, slide the blue Price circle to the left or right to see what destinations populate based on your price parameters. Once you select the maximum price you are willing to pay, the map and list below the Price section will populate.

When you select the flight for your trip, a new section on the right side appears showing you the cost of your different flight options. By clicking View Flight , you will be directed back to the main Google Flights homepage where you can book the flight.

We have found that the best way to use the Explore Destinations tool is when you want to take a trip and have a general idea of when you can travel, but you don’t know exactly where you want to go. In our experience, results have been more helpful when you keep the search criteria more general — for example, picking a month and duration rather than specific dates.

Not to be confused with Explore Destinations in the Flights section, Google Flights has a section titled Explore with recommendations of popular destinations. You can also enter a destination in the search tab directly below the word Explore.

When you click on a destination, Google Flights will take you to the travel guide for that city. For example, if you click Austin in the picture above, you will be directed to the Austin travel guide. Once here, you will find Things To Do, Suggested Day Plans, Plan A Trip, When To Visit, Travel Articles, Travel Videos, See More While You’re There, and Other Places To Explore sections.

The Travel section of Google Flights is another interesting area to check out. When you enter a flight, hotel, or destination, Google Flights will direct you to the Explore, Flights, Hotels, or Packages section of the platform.

Directly below the search area of Travel, Google Flights lists your Upcoming Trips pulled from your Gmail, Potential Trips that you can take, Popular Destinations , and Past Trips that you’ve taken (also pulled from your Gmail).

Bottom Line:  The Trips section helps to direct you to the area of Google Flights that fits your search criteria. 

To book a hotel, start your search with the Hotels section of Google Flights. Simply enter your destination in the Where To? section and your dates in the dates section and you will see both a list and map of hotels for your destination. Narrow down your results using filters such as Number of Guests, Price, Hotel or Vacation Rental, Guest Rating, Amenities, and/or Brands.

Similar to Flights, you can set price alerts to track hotel prices. By setting an alert and entering your email, you will be sent price alerts and travel tips directly to your email.

The Vacation Rentals feature is a great tool for those who want to book a vacation rental instead of a hotel, based on a few criteria, and want to view all of their options across multiple vacation rental platforms.

You can enter your Destination, Date, Budget, Rating, and/or Number of Travelers, and Google Flights will populate the top options based on the criteria entered.

Special Features

Google’s been improving the Flights tool since it launched in 2011 by making it faster, adding new functionalities, and adding airlines and options. Price tracking is just one of those newer features.

As we’ll cover in more detail below, Google Flights will show you whether the price of the flight you’re looking to book is high, low, or typical. This is extremely helpful to ensure that you get the best flight deal.

Google is testing this new feature with a trial period, which is only available on certain flights. You can search for flights on Google Flights to see if your route happens to be one of the routes Google is using during this trial period. As an example of how the new function works, if you book a flight during the trial period, Google will guarantee the price will not drop. If it does, Google pays you the difference. How could you not love that?

As mentioned, the price guarantee function is not fully rolled out just yet. During the roll-out phase, the feature is only available on select flights originating in the U.S.

An additional feature Google Flights has added focuses on your trip itinerary. If your trip confirmation (i.e. flight) is delivered to your Gmail account, Google will show that trip itinerary in your google.com/travel list in a timeline format, similar to what you’ll see with TripIt. It’s an easy-to-read list that shows you everything that you have booked.

After your flight is booked, Google will help you with your next set of travel needs.

When you click on an itinerary shown in your Google Trip list, you’ll see options for hotels, flights, restaurants, and things to do. For example, when you click on Search hotels in XX city for , Google will redirect you to its Google Hotels page. From there, everything you need to know to book a hotel will be at your fingertips.

With respect to restaurants, when you click the Top restaurants in XX city  tab, Google will redirect you to Google Maps. On this page, you’ll see the top-rated restaurants in that city.

But wait, there’s more! When you click on a restaurant, the restaurant’s Google Maps page pulls up. You’ll then be able to click Reserve A Table  to book a reservation. How could it get any easier?

Google Flights will also predict delays to inform your purchase decision. In your search results, Google Flights will provide a note indicating flights that are often delayed.

Google Flights has a flight results filter to show which options include access to an overhead bin for a carry-on bag.

Google Flights has a  free extension for the Google Chrome web browser that adds information about seats to your search results. When you search for an economy class ticket, you’ll see the particular flight’s pitch (distance from the back of one seat to the back of the next seat) on the right-hand side of each result.

Flights with a smaller pitch are highlighted in red, while flights with a more generous pitch are in green. If you search for a premium cabin, you’ll see the type of seat on the flight — for example, a recliner, angled-flat, or lie-flat seat.

This is a fantastically helpful tool! As airlines are still working to make their fleets uniform following mergers over the past few years, it’s helpful to know exactly what kind of seat you’re paying for, especially since it can vary based on which plane is being flown on the route.

Bottom Line:  New features continue to be brought into the software tool — whether officially through Google or through third parties.

Google Flights is built on software that Google acquired when it bought ITA Software in 2011. That software still powers Google Flights, and if you want complete control over your search — from routing and fare code to the tiniest detail — you can access this software’s advanced interface.

ITA Matrix can be quite complicated, but the tradeoff is that you can search with much more control. If you’re interested in learning more, check out this complete guide to ITA Matrix .

Google Flights is a first stop anytime when looking for flights. It includes most airlines, features great prices, and searches various online travel agencies and airline websites to save you time. Even if you plan to book through an online travel agency (OTA), you should always search Google Flights first.

There’s just one catch to be aware of: Google doesn’t have access to pricing for Southwest Airlines flights. Whenever Southwest operates a route, it’ll appear at the bottom of the flight search results, but you’ll have to click it to visit Southwest’s site and see the price for yourself.

For additional information on other OTAs and metasearch engines, you can check out this article on which websites are best for booking flights at the cheapest prices .

Frequently Asked Questions

What is google flights.

Although the tool lets you search for, compare, and purchase flights, it’s not an online travel agency like Orbitz or Priceline. Rather, it’s a highly effective metasearch engine that saves you the step of searching each airline and website individually.

You can compare routes, prices, times, airlines, and more to find the cheapest, most convenient, or preferred flight between any airports.

How does Google Flights work?

The software tool works by searching databases from each airline and online travel agency to find flight schedules, seats, and prices.

Behind the scenes, it works by using a program called ITA Matrix, which was originally developed for travel agents and reservation managers.

Can you book through Google Flights?

Not exactly as the tool itself is just a search engine. That means that unlike a travel agency, it’s not the one selling you the flight.

However, Google includes links with each result to the cheapest available place to book — usually directly with the airline, but sometimes through an online travel agency or one of the airline’s partners.

How reliable is Google Flights?

In theory, any service or search engine can make mistakes. However, the tool gets its information directly from the airlines. That means that if there’s a mistake or something incorrect, that’s because the airline likely did something wrong.

Are Google Flights reservations refundable?

Because you’re not booking directly through Google, you should be sure to check the policy of whichever website you purchase your airfare from, as well as any restrictions with the particular fare you’ve bought.

Was this page helpful?

About Michael McHugh

Born and raised in Mobile, Alabama, Michael took his first international trip in 2013 with friends to the Bahamas. Although he didn’t travel much in his younger years, on that trip, he caught the travel bug and has been hooked ever since.

Michael first caught wind of the points and miles game in 2014 while at a bar in Washington, DC where the conversation amongst friends was quickly derailed because of an alert on a friend’s phone about a mistake fare.  That’s where the love affair with points and miles began.

INSIDERS ONLY: UP PULSE ™

Get the latest travel tips, crucial news, flight & hotel deal alerts...

Plus — expert strategies to maximize your points & miles by joining our (free) newsletter.

We respect your privacy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA. Google's privacy policy and terms of service apply.

Related Posts

UP's Bonus Valuation

This bonus value is an estimated valuation calculated by UP after analyzing redemption options, transfer partners, award availability and how much UP would pay to buy these points.

• Book Travel
• Credit Cards

How to Use Google Flights Like a Pro

Google Flights has emerged as one of the best resources for searching, planning, and booking flights in recent years with its polished, user-friendly, and very powerful interface. 

While the search engine itself is easy enough to figure out as a first-time user, there are several very useful features hidden within the interface that aren’t necessarily apparent at first glance.

In this post, I’ll walk you through all of my favourite Google Flights features, which I use on an almost daily basis whether I’m booking paid flights or planning award trips. 

In This Post

1. the search engine, 2. powerful filters, 3. flexible dates & airports, 4. explore destinations, 5. price tips & price tracking, 6. useful features for planning award travel.

Every session begins at the search engine. Using your current position, Google Flights will pre-populate the Origin, and then invite you to enter your Destination, booking type (round-trip, one-way, or multi-city), number of passengers, class of service, and travel dates.

While the Origin field is restricted to airports and cities (which can encompass multiple airports), the Destination field can handle much larger geographic areas (like “United States”, “Europe”, or “South America”) if you wish to keep your options open.

Both fields can also accommodate multiple entries; Google Flights will search across all possible combinations and show you the best results. 

Once you click “Search”, you’re presented with a list of possible flights. Google Flights first displays what it has identified as the best flights, taking everything into account: price, convenience, trip duration, departure and arrival times, etc.

Note that the search engine displays the total cumulative prices for all passengers, with all taxes and fees included. 

If these options aren’t what you’re looking for, you can expand the list to see the full range of options (for example, in case you’re looking for an itinerary with a longer layover somewhere in the middle, with a greater distance travelled for mileage-earning purposes, etc.) 

Clicking through a search result will bring you to a final confirmation page, which then links out to either the airline’s website or an online travel agency to complete the booking.

In most cases, the links are “deep links”, which means that they take you directly to the payment process on the third-party website – there’s no need to begin the search process on that website all over again.  

At this stage, you can use Google Flights’s powerful set of filters to narrow down the list of search results. You can filter for a variety of criteria – and even multiple criteria simultaneously – in order to narrow down the flight you truly want.

The Bags filter helps you compare the all-in pricing for your flights based on how many bags you need to bring. These days, many North American airlines levy additional bag fees for travel within Canada and the US, so the Checked Bag selector allows Google Flights to add the checked baggage fee to the search results and show you the all-in pricing. 

(This assumes that you don’t hold a co-branded credit card like the WestJet RBC World Elite MasterCard or the American Express Aeroplan Reserve Card that waives checked bag fees, of course.)

On international journeys, airlines usually include one checked bag in every passenger’s allowance. Therefore, the only filter is the Carry-on Bag selector, which only applies to low-cost carriers that might otherwise charge you for bringing on a carry-on. 

The Stops filter allows you to specify if you’re open to any number of connections, no connections, one connection or fewer, or two connections or fewer. In addition to narrowing down the list of flight results, I also find this feature very useful when conducting route research for my award trips (which we’ll discuss below.)

The Airlines filter displays all the possible airlines that fly this given route, allowing you to either filter for or against them. So if you only had a specific airline in mind when searching, you’d only check off that airline, whereas if you wanted to avoid a specific set of airlines, you could do that too.

You may also filter by the major airline alliances: Star Alliance, Oneworld, and SkyTeam. Unlike FlightConnections , where the Alliances and Airlines filters are separate, Google Flights combines them into one; this will again prove useful when researching award trips. 

The Price filter is straightforward, allowing you to set an upper bound on the ticket price that you’re looking for.

Meanwhile, the Times filter allows you to specify limits on the arrival and departure times for all flights on the itinerary, in case you hate going to the airport in the early mornings or you’d prefer not to land at your destination at midnight, after all the transportation services have ended. 

The remaining filters control for Connecting Airports (allowing you to specify a maximum stopover duration at specific connecting airports, if desired), Flight Duration (allowing you to specify a total travel time and weed out those cheap-but-inconvenient 42-hour journeys),  Emissions (allowing you to choose to see low emission flights only), as well as Separate Tickets. 

That last one is very interesting: if you’re booking a round-trip or multi-city trip, Google Flights is smart enough to check whether it’d be cheaper to book everything as separate one-way flights rather than as a single ticket. 

In most cases, booking as a single ticket is optimal, but there will always be exceptions when it’s cheaper to split up the ticket into multiple one-way segments, and Google Flights doesn’t want you to miss out on those deals.

Separate Tickets is enabled by default, but you may also disable it in case you wanted to keep things simple with one booking, even if you might miss out on savings opportunities. 

By combining whichever Google Flights filters you require, you’re able to pinpoint the exact flight itinerary that best fits your needs. 

One of the most common pieces of advice when hunting for cheap flights is to be flexible in terms of your exact travel date, as well as which airport you fly out of or into. Google Flights incorporates these two pieces of advice seamlessly into its search engine.

You can search for flexible dates in several ways. The first is to click on the Date selector at the top, which will then populate every set of dates over the surrounding two-month period with the lowest available price on those dates.

For a round-trip, you can use the trip duration selector at the bottom of the calendar to specify how many days are spanned by your departure and return. Here’s an example for a Vancouver–Tokyo round-trip in early 2023:

Meanwhile, for a one-way flight, the calendar view will simply show the lowest available prices available on every date, with the cheapest options throughout the two-month period highlighted in green.

Best of all, you can combine all the filters we discussed previously with the calendar view as well. Upon selecting your filters, clicking on the Date selector will show you the cheapest dates with your filters being applied. 

I find this calendar view to be extremely useful when I’m planning a trip with some degree of flexibility, as well as when there’s a killer fare sale or a mistake fare available, as it allows me to easily identify which dates the fare applies to and how I might incorporate it into my travel schedule. 

Similar to this calendar view, the Date Grid and Price Graph features, available just underneath the Filters bar, can also be used to accomplish the same thing.

Both tools help you identify savings opportunities by scheduling your trip on a neighbouring date – perhaps departing a day earlier or returning a few days later, or perhaps scheduling a summer trip in late August instead of late July.

So far, all of our optimization tools have focused on finding the best flights possible for a given origin–destination pair. But what if you’re open to travelling to a variety of destinations? Well, that’s where Google Flights’s Explore map – one of its most powerful features – comes in. 

From the homepage, simply leave the Destination field blank and click “Search”, and you’ll be brought to the Explore map, which shows you all of the cheapest available prices for flights to any destination around the world on the dates that you’ve specified.

You can move the map around to focus on parts of the world that you’re more interested in, like Europe…

…or Asia-Pacific.

You may also use the selectors for booking type, number of passengers, and class of service, the Price slider, as well as the filters for Stops, Airlines, Times, Bags, and Duration, to narrow down your search terms further. The Explore map will adjust accordingly based on your specifications.

The Explore map comes in handy under a variety of different circumstances. For example, if you’re planning an extended South East Asia backpacking trip and you aren’t fussy about which airport you fly into (since you’ll be travelling across the whole region anyway), you can use the Explore feature to find the cheapest destination and plan the rest of your journey from there. 

And if you’re flexible with both dates and destinations, then you can choose “Flexible dates” rather than “Specific dates” under the Explore map, which allows you to broadly describe what kind of trip you’re looking for (which month of the year and a rough idea of the duration). Google Flights will then search for all possible itineraries that meet your criteria as you move around the world map. 

When it comes to flight pricing, Google Flights has a wealth of historical and forward-looking data to help you get the best bang for your buck.. It’s Google after all, so you’d expect nothing less. 

For any given flight search, Google Flights will show you whether the prices you’re seeing are “low”, “typical”, or “high” for your trip, based on historical fares between your origin and destination around the same time of year. This is displayed on the main list of search results, as well as on the final pricing page before you click through to the airline or travel agency’s website to book. 

If your flight is significantly cheaper than usual, then you can take comfort in securing a good deal, whereas you might wish to play around with the tools and shop around a little more if it’s relatively expensive. 

Another pricing tip that I’ve found useful over the years is that Google Flights will warn you if the price looks likely to increase over the next little while, thus prompting you to book as soon as possible to secure the current price.

They do this by looking at the underlying fare rules, which is a topic that we covered in the ExpertFlyer guide .

Sometimes, the fare rules might state that the fare must be booked at least 14 days in advance, or perhaps the fare itself is only valid until a certain date (which is coming up soon). In either case, the fare will expire after some time, so Google Flights provides real value in giving you a heads-up.

Finally, if you aren’t quite ready to book something just yet, you can sign in to Google Flights using your Google account and track the price of a specific itinerary. You can also sign up for email notifications when the price increases or decreases significantly, which allows you to keep track of your expected costs for any upcoming trips you’re planning. 

Finally, let’s talk about a few of the ways that I’ve found Google Flights very useful when planning award travel.

While the main functionalities are largely geared towards those who are buying cash fares, Google Flights’s wealth of information about route networks and airline schedules can be immensely helpful to award travellers as well. 

First off, you can use Google Flights as an alternative to FlightConnections when conducting route research. Leverage the many filters at your disposal to track down the information you need.

For example, if dynamic pricing on Air Canada flights on Aeroplan is sky-high, you can combine a “One stop or fewer” filter with a “Star Alliance excluding Air Canada” filter to identify several possible one-stop routings with partner airlines.

(Don’t pay attention to the actual flight prices, since you won’t be making a revenue booking, but are simply using the search results to find possible routings for your award trip.)

In case you don’t have an ExpertFlyer subscription, Google Flights can also be a good tool to figure out which aircraft and seat type is being offered on a specific flight you’re looking at.

For example, if you wanted to tell the difference between ANA’s new 777 business class and ANA’s older staggered business class seats on the 777, then you can track down the flight using Google Flights and see if it’s identified as an “Individual suite”…

…or simply a “Lie-flat seat”. 

The same process can be used for differentiating between various airlines’ older planes with angled or recliner seats and their newer planes with more comfortable lie-flats.

One final application of the Google Flights interface is to simply use the “number of passengers” selector to determine how many seats are remaining for sale on a given First Class flight, if you’re in the process of tracking down last-minute availability. 

If Google Flights returns a valid result when you search for five or six passengers on a non-stop flight in, say, Cathay Pacific First Class or Emirates 777 First Class , then that means that none of the seats have been sold to paying passengers so far, so your odds of snagging last-minute award availability are pretty good. On the other hand, if only one or two seats are available, but a search for three passengers returns no results, then you may have better luck watching an alternative date instead.

The calendar view here can also be useful in determining which dates might give you the best shot at last-minute awards.

Again, this outcome can also be achieved via ExpertFlyer, but Google Flights represents an easy alternative way if you don’t want to pay for an ExpertFlyer membership, or a way to double-check ExpertFlyer’s results even if you do.

After all, no stone can be left unturned in the process of planning an aspirational First Class flight. 😉

The process of booking flights online used to be a bit of a Wild West, with dozens of online travel agencies competing with each other and lingering uncertainty as to which website you should book with. 

That is, until Google came along to take care of business, distilling the vast amount of flight and fare information out there into a seamless Google Flights interface and helping users find the best deal through a plethora of search tools, filters, alternative date and airport suggestions, and helpful pricing tips.

These days, Google Flights is easily my preferred one-stop shop for booking flights, researching routes, or simply getting a bit of travel inspiration via the Explore map. 

Google Flights may be powerful, but ultimately it’s designed to the masses. In the next installment, we’ll look at the real brains behind the brawn, a service Google bought out many years ago that can really help you sink your teeth into advanced trip planning: ITA Matrix.

• Earn 80,000 MR points upon spending $15,000 in the first three months
• Plus, earn  40,000 MR points  upon making a purchase in months 14–17 as a cardholder
• And, earn 1.25x MR points on all purchases
• Also, receive a $200 annual travel credit
• Transfer MR points to Aeroplan and other frequent flyer programs for premium flights
• Unlimited airport lounge access for you and one guest at Priority Pass, Plaza Premium, Centurion, and other lounges
• Credits and rebates for business expenses throughout the year with Amex Offers
• Bonus MR points for referring family and friends
• Qualify for the card as a sole proprietor
• Annual fee: $799

Good to know about the airline trick. Also, it looks like we can once again search multiple origins. Hope it sticks!

Some thing I now know as well.

Learnt a few more bits on Google Flight. Thank you for the research you’ve put in.

My pleasure Goldy!

Even though Google has acquired in ITA Matrix, I still find myself using it more so than Google when looking for ideas and planning bigger trips. Old habits die hard, but I’ve found Google’s interface cumbersome at times.

With simple, very basic trips like for that of my parents, Google is pretty hard to beat.

I liked Google Flights’s older interface better and hated the new interface when they switched over. Nowadays I’m used to it though and find myself using it more than ITA Matrix. I only pop over to Matrix when I need to do more complex stuff, like find a certain fare class, building intricate routings, searching dozens of airports at once, etc.

Thanks for this post, Ricky. Very interesting!

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Prince of Travel is Canada’s leading resource for using frequent flyer miles, credit card points, and loyalty programs to travel the world at a fraction of the price.

Join our Sunday newsletter below to get weekly updates delivered straight to your inbox.

Have a question? Just ask.

Business Platinum Card from American Express

120,000 MR points

American Express Aeroplan Reserve Card

85,000 Aeroplan points

American Express Platinum Card

100,000 MR points

TD® Aeroplan® Visa Infinite Privilege* Card

Up to 85,000 Aeroplan points†

Latest News

Canada’s 33 Best Credit Card Offers for May 2024

Deals May 1, 2024

RBC Avion Credit Cards: New Offers for Up to 70,000 Points

Status Match to Flying Blue Silver, Gold, or Platinum

Apr 30, 2024

Recent Discussion

The beginner’s guide to td, air miles® expands earning at wholesale clubs and other retailers, the complete guide to british airways first class, rbc changes earning rates on the rbc® british airways visa infinite†, christopher, head-to-head: td aeroplan® visa infinite* card vs. westjet rbc® world elite mastercard, prince of travel elites.

Points Consulting

• Credit cards
• View all credit cards
• Banking guide
• Loans guide
• Insurance guide
• Personal finance
• View all personal finance
• Small business
• Small business guide
• View all taxes

You’re our first priority. Every time.

We believe everyone should be able to make financial decisions with confidence. And while our site doesn’t feature every company or financial product available on the market, we’re proud that the guidance we offer, the information we provide and the tools we create are objective, independent, straightforward — and free.

So how do we make money? Our partners compensate us. This may influence which products we review and write about (and where those products appear on the site), but it in no way affects our recommendations or advice, which are grounded in thousands of hours of research. Our partners cannot pay us to guarantee favorable reviews of their products or services. Here is a list of our partners .

A Guide to Google Flights

Many or all of the products featured here are from our partners who compensate us. This influences which products we write about and where and how the product appears on a page. However, this does not influence our evaluations. Our opinions are our own. Here is a list of our partners and here's how we make money .

Table of Contents

How to use Google Flights

Why are google flights cheaper, save money by booking flights with points and miles, final thoughts on using google flights.

Are you looking for cheap flights? Happily, for travelers, there are lots of ways to find discounted airfares. One way is with Google Flights, a powerful tool for searching out the best deals on flights. Let’s take a look at how it works, how to save money with Google Flights and the different ways to maximize it. 

On the surface, Google Flights seems pretty simple to use — and it is. Anyone can navigate to the site, input their search information and receive results. For example, we used Google Flights to search for a round-trip ticket in economy class from Orlando to New York. But you can also search for one-way or multi-city itineraries on Google Flights, as well as business class tickets. 

When you do this, Google will show the flights it thinks are best, whether that means they’re the fastest, the cheapest or some other combination of factors. 

You can stop there if you’d like. Once you’ve selected the flights you prefer, Google will either take you to a booking site or allow you to book directly within its platform.

But there’s so much more to customize, including departure times, luggage policy and airlines. 

Filtering by price

Perhaps the most useful feature of Google Flights is the ability to set your price point. 

If you’re especially price-sensitive, filtering out expensive flights can show you exactly what’s available within your budget.

» Learn more: The best airline credit cards right now

Searching for nonstops

Are you the type of flyer who simply wants to get there? Are connections the bane of your existence? 

The stops filter on Google Flights allows you to set how many layovers you’re willing to tolerate, whether that’s one stop, two stops or no stops at all.

Selecting departure times

If you have an early-morning meeting or you’re looking to leave a little later, you’ll want to filter out the flights that don’t fit your needs. To do so, hit the “times” button on the search page. 

From here, you can edit and search for the time your flights will take off and land for both legs of your journey. 

Choosing your airlines

Are you a Star Alliance loyalist? How about a fan of SkyTeam ? If you’re trying to stick with an airline alliance — or even a specific airline — Google has that covered. 

You can use the "airlines" filter to show different airlines on the route that you’re searching. Depending on your needs, you can opt to show results from different alliances or by individual airlines. 

This can be especially helpful if you have a travel voucher to spend or you’re looking to earn elite status on an airline.

» Learn more: The best airline elite status for 2022

Include your luggage in your search

Whether you’re an overpacker or a light traveler, Google Flights gives you the option to choose how much luggage you’d like to bring. 

The "bags" filter can show you flights that include luggage — so you don’t have to worry about additional fees. 

» Learn more: 7 tips to avoid paying checked baggage fees

Setting your layovers

Some savvy flyers enjoy the ability to take a few stopovers en route to their destination. Others, well, not so much. 

If you have to stop over, the "connecting airports" filter allows you to select where your layover will be. Have you been wanting to check out the SkyDeck at the Delta Sky Club in New York-JFK ? Well, you can filter out other airports and choose how long you’d like your layover to be with this option. 

Limiting the length 

Combined with the ability to pick your layovers, limiting the duration of your flight allows you to pick the fastest routes. This is especially useful when Google presents options that can take 30 hours or more.

Conversely, you can also choose to keep this toggle unused, thus letting you build in some free city-break layovers on the longest flights. 

Saving the environment

It’s no secret that air travel produces some serious carbon emissions. If that's a concern, Google has a filter to show you which flights have a lower impact on the environment.

Although the filter isn’t robust, you are able to see the emissions in your search results. 

» Learn more: 4 cheap ways to be an eco-conscious traveler

So we’ve explored all the different filters available during a standard search with Google Flights. These give you the ultimate in customization, so if you’d like a flight from New York to Paris featuring two stops, a layover in Frankfurt and two checked bags — that’s an option. 

However, there are also ways to maximize Google Flights to save money. Here's how. 

Check out the fare calendar 

When you start out your search, you’ll notice that you pick your dates from a calendar. However, if you hover over the calendar long enough, you’ll start to see prices appear. 

Google Flights displays ticket prices for a two-month window. If you have flexibility on your travel dates, it’s worth taking a look around to see when flights are the least expensive. Google even helps you out by highlighting the cheapest fares in green.

Search multiple airports

Google Flights doesn’t limit you to searching from a single airport. This handy feature allows you to check out flights from neighboring airports, as well as those which you’re willing to depart from. 

To search for multiple airports, start typing in the search bar. 

In this case, adding multiple airports allowed us to find a flight for $176 rather than the $228 in the original search.

Allow separate tickets

This is actually a type of filter, but it’s a bit more advanced than your usual options. When searching, you have the option whether to allow separate tickets or not. It’s found at the very bottom of the little “all filters” tab on your search results page. 

Allowing for separate tickets means that you may need to book two one-way flights rather than a round-trip flight, though Google will only highlight these results if they’re cheaper than a single-ticket itinerary. 

Set a flight alert

Did you know that Google Flights can send you emails? If a flight you’re looking for is too expensive, you can sign-up for alerts that’ll let you know when the price drops. 

Along with this, Google will also let you know whether the price for your flights is appropriate. This little graph won’t show up on all searches, but if Google has data for the flight you’ll see this pop up when you’re scrolling through the search results. 

Use the Google Flights Explorer

Do you have flexibility on your travel? Are you just trying to figure out somewhere to go? Perhaps the most underrated part of Google Flights is the Explorer option, which can be found on the left-hand side when on the Google Flights page.

This incredibly useful tool allows you to set extra flexible parameters for a trip. Say, for instance, you’d like to take a week-long vacation within the next six months. You only want to fly business class, however, and you don’t want to pay more than $2,700 round-trip. 

Input all this information and a Google Flights map will pop up, showing you all your available options. 

Like standard Google Flights, the Explorer tool also has a variety of filters. This includes the ability to sort by airlines and airline alliances, making this a powerful instrument for those looking to earn elite status with airlines. 

» Learn more: 6 ways to save money on flights

Airline miles, also called frequent flyer miles or points, are an airline’s currency that you can use for flight redemptions, hotel stays and sometimes other rewards. These work a little differently at every airline. According to NerdWallet analysis, they're generally worth 0.8 to 2 cents each .

But before you start using airline miles, you have to earn them. Beyond flying, another way to amass a large number of travel rewards is to earn a sign-up bonus from a travel credit card.

Google Flights is a robust search tool for those looking to book flights.

Although it’s easy to use, don’t be fooled by its simple appearance. It contains a wide variety of filter options allowing you to design your perfect itinerary and save money while doing it. 

How to maximize your rewards

You want a travel credit card that prioritizes what’s important to you. Here are our picks for the best travel credit cards of 2024 , including those best for:

Flexibility, point transfers and a large bonus: Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card

No annual fee: Bank of America® Travel Rewards credit card

Flat-rate travel rewards: Capital One Venture Rewards Credit Card

Bonus travel rewards and high-end perks: Chase Sapphire Reserve®

Luxury perks: The Platinum Card® from American Express

Business travelers: Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card

on Chase's website

1x-5x 5x on travel purchased through Chase Travel℠, 3x on dining, select streaming services and online groceries, 2x on all other travel purchases, 1x on all other purchases.

60,000 Earn 60,000 bonus points after you spend $4,000 on purchases in the first 3 months from account opening. That's $750 when you redeem through Chase Travel℠.

1.5%-6.5% Enjoy 6.5% cash back on travel purchased through Chase Travel; 4.5% cash back on drugstore purchases and dining at restaurants, including takeout and eligible delivery service, and 3% on all other purchases (on up to $20,000 spent in the first year). After your first year or $20,000 spent, enjoy 5% cash back on travel purchased through Chase Travel, 3% cash back on drugstore purchases and dining at restaurants, including takeout and eligible delivery service, and unlimited 1.5% cash back on all other purchases.

$300 Earn an additional 1.5% cash back on everything you buy (on up to $20,000 spent in the first year) - worth up to $300 cash back!

on Capital One's website

2x-5x Earn unlimited 2X miles on every purchase, every day. Earn 5X miles on hotels and rental cars booked through Capital One Travel, where you'll get Capital One's best prices on thousands of trip options.

75,000 Enjoy a one-time bonus of 75,000 miles once you spend $4,000 on purchases within 3 months from account opening, equal to $750 in travel.

Android Police

9 simple google flights tips and tricks to try on your next trip.

Snag sweet travel deals with Google's flight search platform

Google Flights is among the best apps for cheap travel . It's the one-stop search engine for airplane trips and consolidates hundreds of top online travel agencies (OTAs). You can search for the best ones in a central hub from your mobile phone or personal computer . You won't have to visit multiple websites, and you can find anything based on round or multi-city trip entries and other criteria. Flights also has tools for cost comparison, so you can see whether current prices are high compared to historical data. Here's how to save money and reach your desired locations quickly.

1 Use the price comparison tool

Google Flights has a date grid that displays departure and return dates around your selected travel dates. Dates with the lowest prices indicate the figures in green. Those in red indicate higher-than-usual prices. Use the grid to make comparisons and find the best rates for your budget.

The price graph shows a visual representation of flight patterns. You'll identify optimal times to fly based on pricing trends. You can even view the full price history for a route up to 60 days before the current date. Here's how to use these features:

1. On your browser, visit google.com/travel/flights .

2. Enter your location and destination. Then click Search .

3. Click Date grid to make price comparisons.

4. Select Price graph to view fare trends by month or week.

How to easily pack your electronics for travel

2 explore affordable travel options.

The Google Flights search tools help you find available and affordable airlines. Typically, you'll enter your location and destination in the search fields. This function only brings flight results along the route you selected. If you leave the destination field blank, Flights shows a map in the Explore tab . You can pan it for airlines with the best fares.

If your travel plans are flexible, you could save on flights by considering alternative travel dates. Flights automatically sets a sample trip duration lasting for a week and within the next six months. This default date range might not give you the best deals. Click the sample date, or use the search fields on the left sidebar to adjust dates according to your preferences.

3 Get inspiration on what to do

The Explore tab is where Google Flights shows airlines, prices, and available flights. You can also use it for inspiration when planning your schedule. Clicking a destination on the map shows places to see in the left sidebar. You can also find hotels and vacation rentals if you don't have accommodation.

The sidebar also shows peak and off seasons to help you determine the best time to visit a place. This way, you avoid travel disasters when there's too much population, bad weather, and other factors. People often ask questions about locations on Google Search. Explore pulls the ones related to a place, allowing you to expand them quickly without running a separate search.

4 Search and book multi-city trips

Searching for destinations and booking repeatedly on Google Flights is stressful. The platform allows you to perform multi-city searches simultaneously. Plus, you can make broader comparisons between fares and save money on international trips.

Instead of booking separate one-way flights, you'll book multi-city flights as a single unit with supported airlines or separately. Here's how to use the feature:

1. Go to the Google Flights website .

2. Click Round trip . Then, select Multi-city .

3. Click Add flight to insert more fields. Then, enter where you're flying from and where to in each of them.

4. Enter the departure dates. Then, click Search . The platform provides results for all available flights in your selected regions.

5 Automatic price guarantee

Price guarantee helps you secure the best prices for your flights. The feature is available for flights with charges that Google has assurance of before it takes off. If you turn on the feature for a booked flight, Google monitors the rates until you board and gives you a refund if it turns out cheaper than originally displayed.

However, the price difference must exceed $5 to qualify for a payout. Also, you can only receive a maximum payout of $500 per Google account within a year. The feature works for trips you book on Google Flights, as well as those you discover on the platform but eventually book on the airline's website.

Price Guarantee is a pilot program and is still under testing. Not all flights are eligible for it until Google expands it. Eligible flights have a colored badge near them. Click a checkbox when booking to activate the feature.

How to plan a road trip with an electric vehicle

6 set fare alerts.

While Google Flights does its best to save your money, airline fares can change at any time. Price surges usually happen closer to departure dates because fewer seats are available. Airlines try to capitalize on travelers' willingness to pay for the remaining ones. Other times, pricing drops or remains stable when fewer travelers book flights.

You can set alerts to monitor these changes for specific routes on Flights. You'll receive automatic notifications via email. It saves you from constantly checking the prices yourself. Here's how to do it:

1. On the Google Flights website, enter your departure point and destination.

2. Set your departure and return dates.

3. Click Search .

4. Turn on the toggle switch beside Track prices . Flights sends you email notifications when travel fares change for your route within the specified dates.

7 Confirm ghosting prices

Ghosting prices refer to situations where you spot attractive flight fares. When you try to book them, the price jumps or becomes unavailable. There's an explanation for it. Google Flights is a flight search engine, not a booking platform. Even though it provides booking buttons and options, all links lead you to book with airlines or online travel agencies.

When you experience ghosting dates, airlines have updated their prices. However, there's a slight delay before Google Flights receives the information. Double-check the airline's website or contact them. You may still be able to access the ghosting prices.

8 Book layover flights

Layover flights are connecting air trips that include one or more stops between your starting point and destination. They are often cheaper than nonstop flights for the same route. Airlines usually have hubs or stop points for travelers going to various destinations.

If you're flexible with your travel plans, booking two separate flights – one from Point A to the layover city and another from the layover city to Point B – can be cheaper than booking a direct flight. However, it will take longer to reach your destination.

Google Flights has a handy layover duration feature. It tells you how long you'll wait at the airport before boarding your next flight to your final destination. Use this tool to filter the shortest route for you. Follow the steps below to start:

1. On the Flights page, click the Connecting airports search filter.

2. Use the slider to adjust your preferred layover duration.

3. Select your preferred airports. The platform shows the results.

9 Change your currency, language, or location on Google Flights

Google Flights typically sets the search currency, location, and language to match your IP address. If you're in the United States, you'll see prices in dollars. But it may be wrong. There are buttons beneath the menus and web pages for changing your language, country, and currency. You can also access the buttons on the platform's menu. Here's how to use both methods:

1. On the Google Flights website, scroll down to the bottom of the web page.

2. Click the Language , Country , and Currency options to adjust the settings to your preferences.

3. Alternatively, click the menu icon in the upper-left corner. Then, use the corresponding options.

How to pair earbuds or AirPods to a plane's seatback entertainment system

Use google flights to save on your next trip.

Google Flights finds flights well, but that's where its efforts stop. You'll need trip-planning features to enhance your experience. You'll find them in other dedicated travel apps , like itinerary building, budgeting, activity recommendations, and offline access. Some apps help you find accomodations and help you pack. Download them for free on the Google Play Store.

• Step-By-Step Guide
• Google Flights Guide
• Momondo Guide
• Online Travel Agency Guide
• Southwest Airlines Guide
• Airline Seating Guide
• Train Travel
• Ferry Travel
• Blablacar Guide
• Poparide Guide
• Hitchhiking
• Car Rental Guide
• Ride-Hailing Guide
• Public Transport Guide
• Booking Your Accommodation
• Airbnb & Vrbo Guide
• Hostel Guide
• Couchsurfing Guide
• Coronavirus Travel
• Proof of Onward Travel
• Dual Passport Travel
• Travel Insurance
• Advanced Travel Safety
• Female Traveler Safety
• Best Travel Debit Cards
• Best Travel Credit Cards
• Getting Cash
• Travel-Ready Phones
• Prepaid SIM Cards
• Top Travel Apps
• Packing Guide
• Group Tours
• North America
• Southeast Asia
• Central & South America
• Middle East & North Africa
• Australia & Oceania
• Sub-Saharan Africa
• South & Central Asia
• Cheapest Destinations
• Split-Ticketing
• One-Way Return Tickets
• Hidden-City Ticketing
• More Strategies
• Budget Airline Guide
• Cheap Transportation Guide
• Cheap Accommodation Guide
• Top Budget Travel Tips
• Travel Blog

How To Search For Multiple Airports With Google Flights

So the 4th part of my Guide to Google Flights is a mix of teaching you a cool feature provided by Google Flights and a strategy you can use in your travels to get the cheapest flight deals possible.  

So without further ado, let’s get into it!

When playing around with Google Flights, you may have noticed that there is a + sign next to the city names for both the departure and arrival cities that appears when you click on their respective fields.  If you hover over it with your mouse, it says “Select multiple airports”:

You’re probably wondering what that’s all about.  Well if you click the plus sign, the airplane and location icons to the left of those city names become unchecked boxes (with the exception of the box representing the city you already selected):

Furthermore, if you click the downwards arrow to the right of your city, a list of nearby airports will appear that you can choose from!

You’re probably wondering what all of this is about.  Well, if you were to check another one of those boxes such as the one for Seattle, any and all flights from that airport would be included in your search results.  

“ Why would I care about flights from Seattle if I live in Vancouver?” , you ask…

Well this is where the travel strategy I talked about at the beginning of this page comes in.  Some cities are only serviced by one airport (Denver, for example).  Others are serviced by 2 or more (London with 6, for example).  But many places, although not technically being serviced by other airports, are within a reasonable distance from those airports.  Let me explain.

If we take a look above at the nearby airports to the Vancouver one, there are a few that are within driving, train, or bus distance such as the Abbotsford and Seattle airports.  What does this mean?  Well if you are able to drive to those airports or willing to take a bus or train to get to them, you might be able to take advantage of cheaper flights. 

Of course, you’d have to factor in the cost of travel to those airports, but sometimes you’ll find that a flight from another nearby airport is much cheaper than one from the airport you usually fly from, even after you factor in those extra travel costs! 

And if you live in a city that doesn’t have its own major airport or you live in the middle of several cities that do, then this feature is especially useful to see all the options available from all the airports nearest to you.

Let’s see it in action. 

Let’s say I live in Trenton, New Jersey and I want to travel to Belgium.  Trenton doesn’t have its own major airport, but the closest airport to it is Philadelphia’s and it’s the one I’m used to traveling from anyways so I’m going to search for a one-way flight from Philadelphia to Brussels on Mar 6 using my usual search filters and see what I get:

Only one flight available and it’s also a little on the pricey side, I would say.  Assuming I can’t fly on another date when the flight is cheaper, the other option I have is to consider flying from another nearby airport.  Let’s go through the steps I outlined earlier to see what’s available.  

Clicking on Philadelphia, then the plus sign, and then the arrow to show the nearby airports, this is what I get:

Note: you can also see options available from other airports by clicking on Nearby Airports under the search filters, but I would avoid using it because I find it often doesn’t show you all the options available whereas the checkbox method does.

There’s one airport that instantly stands out and that’s JFK airport in New York which is only about 80 miles, or a 1.5 hour drive away from Trenton.  If this isn’t too much of a distance for me, then I could save over $500 on this flight!  

But let’s just check the flights from all of the nearby airports that have flights available because sometimes Google doesn’t update the price previews when you add filters so we need to check the search results. 

Note: Google Flights also doesn’t always show you all the closest airports available so sometimes you will have to input them manually.  To do this, after clicking the plus sign, just type in the 3-letter airport code for the airport you want to add to your search.  If you don’t know the airport code for any specific airport, just google it and you’ll find it!  Remember, you can only have 7 total airports each in both your departure and arrival airport fields.

In my case, there are only 5 nearby airports with available flights so I will check all of those and see all the flights that are available from them:

So Google Flights isn’t perfect and sometimes shows phantom prices when playing with different airports so that $197 price we saw in the preview doesn’t exist.  However, there is an option for $311 available with an airport change and separate tickets as well as a direct flight for $510 from JFK airport, over $200 cheaper than from Philly’s airport.

Note: Booking separate tickets for an outbound journey can be a good way to save money, but can also be quite risky.  Learn more about what I call split-ticketing in Part 1 of my Guide to Cheap Flight Strategies .

But we’re not done yet because we can also do the same thing with the arrival airport!  So let’s see what’s available if we add some nearby arrival airports:

So far the preview looks promising.  Amsterdam seems to have a very cheap flight and Paris also has a decently priced one too!  Let’s see the full details of the flights before we get too excited though:

Hint: you can also go back and check if there are any other nearby departure airports with flights available to add now that you have added other arrival airports to your search!  

We got lucky this time!  Norwegian offers a direct flight for only $167 from JFK airport to Amsterdam which is only a 1.5 hour train ride away from Brussels.  Of course, we’d have to factor in the cost of the train ticket (or bus ticket if we really want to save money) as well as the cost of whatever transportation we choose to take to get to JFK from Trenton, but that’s peanuts compared to what we’re saving on this flight!

Some things to note about this itinerary:

1. Norwegian is a budget airline and doesn’t offer free carry-on so that would cost extra.  Find out more about budget airlines in my Guide to Budget Airlines .

2. To learn how to find and book your train or bus tickets, check out my Guide to Train Travel and Guide to Bus Travel .

But that’s basically it!

The Multiple Airlines feature is an awesome feature that I think deserves much more attention than it gets because it can provide you with many good options for getting to your destination for cheaper if you are flexible enough!  I always use this feature when I travel in Europe because there is always a cheaper way to get to where I want to go.

It’s especially useful if you live between major airports and you often fly from different airports in your travels because it lets you see all the flights available on the same page instead of having to open multiple pages to see all your options. 

And if you’re wary about adding all these extra steps to your itinerary, you can look at it from the perspective of giving you an excuse to spend some time in another destination too.  For example, even though you want to go to Belgium, you could also spend a few days in Amsterdam because why not?

By the way, if you liked the tricks I showed you in this guide about how you can fly for cheaper, you’d love my Guide to Cheap Flight Strategies !

But that’s not all there is to Google Flights, there is still one more feature that you should know about!   Continue on to Part 5 to learn all about the Price Tracking feature.

About The Author

Hi there,  I’m Sebastian , founder and creator of Travel Done Simple. Since I turned 20, I have lived in 5 different countries and traveled to over 40 others! You can learn more about me on my  About page   and find me on social media.

Hi there, I’m Sebastian , founder and creator of Travel Done Simple. Since I turned 20, I have lived in 5 different countries and traveled to over 40 others! You can learn more about me on my About page   and find me on social media.

I’m Sebastian , the founder and creator of Travel Done Simple! I was born in Europe and raised in Canada, but I now consider myself to be a citizen of the world. When I’m not busy exploring new destinations, I’m here giving you the best travel tips so you can do the same! 

You can learn more about me on my About page and if it’s your first time on my site,  start here !

Find Whatever You Need

Latest travel blog posts.

The Best Balkan Trip Itinerary

Life in the Kootenays (BC, Canada)

My Experience In Morocco Feat. That Time I Crashed A Moroccan Baby Shower

Like on facebook.

(And join the official group too!)

Follow on Instagram

Downwithsebster.

Home | About | Contact | Privacy Policy & Disclosure

© 2024 Travel Done Simple - All Rights Reserved

• Travel recommendations
• The taste of travel
• Tips & tricks
• Travel experiences

What are multi-city flights and how to book them on KAYAK?

If you’re like me and you love to travel as much as humanly possible, then multi-city flights might be perfect for you. As booking multi-city flights allow multiple flight destinations, you’re able to see and visit various cities or countries in just one trip. They add that flexibility where you can create layovers, combine numerous trips, or even fly in and out of different airports. Sometimes, they might even cost less. In this article, I’ll fully explain what multi-city flights are, how precisely they work and how you can book them.

In this post

• What is a multi-city flight?
• How to book multi-city flights on KAYAK?
• What are the best destinations for a multi-city trip?
• Is there a secret trick to the best way to book multi-city trips?

1. What is a multi-city flight?

A multi-city flight is a type of flight itinerary that includes more than one destination. For example, you can book a multi-city flight from Los Angeles to St. Louis, then from St. Louis to New Orleans, and then from New Orleans back to Los Angeles. This way, you can visit more than one destination in just one trip , without having to book separate tickets for each of the legs. And you’re ready for a multi-city adventure . Read on how to build a multi-city itinerary and start planning your travel.

Some main advantages to multi-city flights are:

• Potentially save money on airfare by combining multiple destinations into one ticket.
• Definitely save on baggage fees by checking your luggage only once .
• Gain time by avoiding unnecessary layovers or connections.
• You can explore more destinations by adding extra legs to your trip.
• Customize your trip according to your preferences and interests.
• Mix and match different airlines and airports to find great deals.

2. How to book multi-city flights on KAYAK?

Booking a multi-city flight is very easy with KAYAK’s Flight Search tool that lets you select “Multi-city” instead of “Round-trip” or “One-way” – and here you can add your extra legs to your itinerary. Let’s give you a step-by-step on how to book a multi-city flight :

• Go to KAYAK.com/flights , and select “Multi-city” from a drop-down menu underneath where it says “Where are you flying?”
• Enter desired dates and destinations.
• Add the number of passengers, the cabin class you prefer and baggage per passenger.
• Now you just need to hit the search orange button 👇.

You can fine-tune the results by adding and subtracting legs as you start planning your itinerary. Sort the results based on time of day taking off, or landing (earliest or latest) to make things easy to sift through.

Next, it’s highly advisable to carefully review the booking details, as there are more legs to double-check on.

3. What are the best destinations for a multi-city trip?

Multi-city trips are fit for most destinations (not all) – so toggling with various options makes total sense. One ticket, multiple destinations . It’s easy and just the way I love to see the world. Here is an example itinerary for a trip with multiple stops.

• Atlanta – London Aug 1
• London by train to Paris, Aug 4
• Paris to Amsterdam also by train Aug 8
• Amsterdam to Berlin Aug 12
• Berlin to Madrid Aug 14
• Madrid back to Atlanta, Aug 17

✈️ Pro tip: Use the KAYAK Trips , which helps you with planning and organizing your trip in detail.

4. Is there a secret trick to the best way to book multi-city trips?

For me, a travel writer, it’s always about saving time. If I’m avoiding unnecessary layovers or connections , it means I have more time to explore my destination . If I spend all my time having to book multiple tickets and checking in multiple times, I am not spending my limited hours venturing around and meeting new humans. Of course, I also love to add extra legs to my trip.

I’ve added stopovers in Africa, like Nairobi en route to Johannesburg, in order to get some time in Kenya. Many airlines actually encourage this, too – with special offers and what they call “free stopovers” in places like Iceland and Portugal. And let’s face it, being able to mix and match also means I am actively curating and customizing my travel schedules.

How was this guide created?

I have been on the road, roughly 200 days every year , for the better part of two decades. As you can imagine I am constantly taking multiple flights and having to puzzle out my travel. What I like to do is spend time online finding interesting routes to fly – who knew you could get to Paris via Morocco! And then I often crowdsource and ask friends what they are doing with their itineraries, as I am always learning something new. It isn’t a perfect science, of course, but I love to be able to keep things a little more flexible.

Some of our top flight routes:

• Flights to New York
• Flights to Las Vegas
• Flights to Los Angeles
• Flights to Orlando
• Flights to Denver

This post is part of our Flight guide. Booking a flight and need handy travel tips ? Our guide has got you covered.

Multi-city flights FAQ

In fact, you can save money on flights by combining multiple destinations into one ticket. Sometimes, especially during peak season or between the most popular routes, booking a multi-city flight can be cheaper than booking multiple one-way tickets. And you can avoid all the search time looking for one-way tickets all over the globe.

Most airlines release their flight schedules around 11 months, or so, before the dates. With international travel, there are some rules worth following – summer months are very busy and thus demand goes up, and you might not be able to get the exact flights you are after. A good rule of thumb is to start looking roughly 6 months before your specific travel dates, and not wait much later than 3 months before you’re planning to get into the skies.

This is a type of multi-city flight. It means that you fly into one city and out of another. For example, you can book an open-jaw flight from New York to Boston, then take the train to Providence, Rhode Island from Boston, and then fly back to New York from Providence. This way, you can explore all these places in a way that you would like, without having to necessarily backtrack or return to your original destination.

Absolutely you can. It’s a simple multi-city flight, or call it an “open-jaw flight.” And KAYAK has the perfect search tool to help with these. Try KAYAK’s Flight Search and click on multi-city instead of return or one-way.

About the author

Explore more articles

California consumers have the right to opt out of the sale * of their personal information. For more information on how we securely process personal information, please see our Privacy Policy .

Do not sell my info ON

* The definition of "sale" under the California Consumer Privacy Act is applicable only to California consumers.

• Help Center
• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Service
• Submit feedback
• Announcements

Find plane tickets on Google Flights

When you use Google Flights to find plane tickets, you can get the best fares for where and when you want to travel. Use Google flights to:

• Find and book round-trip, one-way and multi-city tickets.
• Use an interactive calendar and price graph to find the best fares.
• Filter your flight search by cabin class, airline and number of stops.

Google Flights allows you to book flights from more than 300 airline and online travel agency partners. These partnerships have no impact on the ranking of offers suggested to you.

Find your flights

• Go to Google Flights .
• Tip: You can also find destinations by clicking a popular destinations list or a world map.
• At the top, select your ticket type: one-way, round-trip or multi-city.
• At the top, select the number of passengers and cabin class.
• Tip: Flight prices are updated approximately once every 24 hours.
• To filter your results, click Stops , Airlines , Times or More .

• Choose a flight for each part of your trip.
• When you click Select for your ticket(s), you'll usually be taken to the airline's website or online travel agency to complete the transaction.
• In some cases, you can book separate tickets for one trip .
• Once you've booked a flight, contact the airline or online travel agent to confirm your booking, change it, cancel it or to resolve any issue that may arise.

For more information, refer to the airline or online travel agent's terms and conditions on their site.

Tip: If your flight can't be booked online, you'll see instructions to book by phone.

Flight insights

After searching for your tickets, 'Flight insights' gives you options to optimise your travel experience.

Booking separate tickets for one trip

Flights can be bought as separate tickets from one or more partners. This option might appear when it could save you money or open more flight schedules.

Instructions to buy tickets separately

If you see a notice that both tickets can be bought in a single transaction from an online travel agency, click the link to visit their website.

• Visit the first airline or online travel agency's website.
• Double-check the price and buy your first ticket.
• Immediately visit the next airline's or travel agency's website and buy the second ticket, to make sure that your second ticket is still available. If your second ticket can't be bought, in most cases in the United States, you can call the airline to take advantage of 24-hour refund policies to refund the first ticket.
• If you need to make changes, you might be charged a change fee for each ticket.
• Each airline has different baggage rules and fees.
• Buying separate tickets from different airlines may require claiming and rechecking baggage, which takes additional time, so plan accordingly.
• If your outbound trip is delayed, for example in the case of a stopover or multi-city trip, you might miss your second trip. To find out about your options, contact the airline.

Why some flights aren't included

Google Flights uses over 300 partners, like airlines, online travel agencies and aggregators, to display its offers. Not all airlines or available flights are included, as a partnership with Google is required. Most of these partners provide Google with all prices and flight options that they would show on their own websites or through third-party sites. This ensures that you get a complete view of the flights and prices that match your search, without the need to check prices on multiple sites.

Some flights might not show up when:

• The flights are sold out or unavailable
• The carrier hasn't yet been added to Google Flights

About baggage fees, prices and more

Specific or additional insurances and/or commercial warranties may be offered by the carriers. For more info, please visit the carrier's website.

Related resources

• Track flights and prices
• Filter flight prices by baggage fees

• First Class
• Hotels / Stays
• Flight & Hotel
• Trains / Buses
• Things To Do

Start your search

Cheap multi-city flights from the world's best sites

• Things to Do

Add another flight

Flexible Dates

Select search engines to load: Select All

Enter your desired departure airports, destinations and travel dates for up to 6 flight legs

Save up to 20% by comparing multiple flight comparison sites using our intuitive dashboard

Book your multi-city flight at the cheapest price possible, with your choice of provider

Recent deals found from

How FlightsFinder finds the cheapest multi-city flights using the world's best search engines

Welcome to the world's first multi-city meta-meta flight search® engine. We are the first unique website to compare multiple flight aggregators (also known as meta-search engines/ flight comparison sites) for the cheapest multi-city flights from one convenient dashboard. Select up to 6 flight legs using our main search engine form, enter your dates, and we will compare the best multi-city prices from KAYAK, Skyscanner, momondo, Jetradar, Kiwi.com and more. By comparing multiple sites on our easy to use dashboard, you can save up to 20% off your next multi-city flight ticket. Different websites search different travel sources and agents, leading to different pricing. Always compare multiple sites using our multi-city flight finder to ensure the best multi-stop flight deals.

How to find cheap multi-city flights: Questions & Answers

What are the world's best multi-city flight search engines.

The best sites to use to find the cheapest multi-city flights are those known as flights comparison sites or flight aggregators. They use clever technology which scans multiple travel agents and airline websites to find the cheapest available multi-destination flights. The best websites currently on the market are KAYAK, Skyscanner, Kiwi.com, momondo, Google flights & Jetradar. We search multiple flight aggregators from our powerful meta-meta dashboard, ensuring the best multi-stop flights do not pass you by.

How much can I save by comparing sites for multi-city flights?

Sometimes you can find drastic price differences between the search engines due to different data sources scanned by various search engines. The best way around this is to search multiple multi-city flight search engines in seconds via our flight finder dashboard. You can save up to 20% by comparing the world's best multi-city flight search engines.

About KAYAK's multi-city flight search?

Based in the USA and part of the booking holdings conglomerate, KAYAK is one of the worlds leading meta-search engines. They have a mighty multi-city flight search engine that searches hundreds of travel agents and airlines with one single search. They also have special hacker fares where they combine itineraries from different airlines. You can compare KAYAK's multi-stop flight results on the first tab of our search results page.

What is Skyscanner's multi-city search like?

Skyscanner, part of Trip.com, has developed one of the world's most comprehensive multi-city flight searches. It is essential to check Skyscanner's results alongside other search engines to ensure the very best multi-stop deals. Skyscanner zips through hundreds of websites to find the best priced multi-city flights but can sometimes be beaten on price. The best way to make sure you get the best priced multi-city flights is to use our dashboard that compares multiple flight aggregators.

Is momondo multi-city search any good?

Momondo is Denmark's premier flight search engine. They have become one of the world's most popular flight comparison sites and search hundreds of unique sites to find the cheapest multi-city flights. You can see momondo results on our tab based search results page alongside some of the world's best competing search engines. Momondo also lets you see prices based on your payment method, as sometimes airlines charge a premium if you choose credit cards instead of debit payments. You can see how this affects flight price by selecting your payment method using the filters provided; you can choose Visa debit, Visa Credit, American Express, Paypal, etc.

About JetRadar's Multi-city search engine?

JetRadar is a Thai based metasearch engine that currently has partnerships with 535 airlines and 35 travel agencies worldwide. It is always worth checking their results alongside the other search engines. You can filter results by selecting 'best tickets', showing you the best balance between convenience and price. You can also filter results by deciding whether you require baggage or not, which can affect the total flight price. You can search JetRadar results on our multiple multi-city flight search results page.

What is Kiwi's nomad search for cheap multi-city flights?

Kiwi.com has developed an interesting multi-city flight search engine called 'Nomad'. Nomad shuffles through multiple itineraries to find the best and cheapest multi-destination routes, combining flights, buses and trains. Kiwi is also famous for its virtual interlining, which combines itineraries from over 750 airlines that sometimes do not cooperate. They also provide the flexibility to rebook or cancel your booking should the need arise and offer a Kiwi guarantee where they will cover the cost of your ticket should you miss a connecting flight for whatever unforeseen reason.

When is the cheapest time to buy multi-city flights?

The strange anomaly about multi-stop flights is that you can often find cheaper multi-city itineraries than single return flights. To know when is the most reasonable time to buy these tickets, you should use a flexible search engine. Luckily we have developed a powerful, flexible date search engine at FlightsFinder.com, but you have to use it to check one-way flights to get a rough idea of the cheapest dates to fly. Once you have an idea of the cheapest dates to travel on our flexible flight page, come back to our multi-city search page and search on those dates. You can potentially save even more by comparing multiple comparison sites on those dates using our intuitive dashboard.

How to find open-jaw flights using our multi-city search?

Open-jaw flights are those where you fly into one city but fly out of another. For example, an open-jaw flight would fly from New York to Seattle and return from San Francisco to New York. You can easily search for open-jaw flights on our multi-city search page by entering where you wish to go and which city you want to return from. Open-jaw flights can be cheaper than return flights from the exact location; we recommend playing around with our robust search engine to see what you can find.

Is it cheaper to buy single flights or multi-city flights?

In our experience, it is unpredictable which search will end up cheaper between buying multiple one-way tickets or searching a multi-city itinerary. Our best advice would be to use our one-way search engine to see single priced flights and then compare that with the prices you find on our multi-city flight page. Generally speaking, solo travellers can find cheap one-way flights by stitching together complex itineraries. We recommend going down the multi-city flight search route if travelling with a family.

Is Google's multi-city flight search the best?

Google flights have developed the fastest flight search engine on the planet. Results load lightning-fast, and they offer users the ability to search for multi-city routes. The downside is that Google flights can be beaten on occasion by other aggregators. For example, we searched for a multi-city flight from SFO > LON --- LON > BCN --- BCN > ROM --- ROM > SFO; the cheapest flight on Google was $1097, whilst Kiwi returned the most affordable flights at $886. The best thing to do is to use our dashboard, which allows you to compare multiple search engines in seconds.

FlightsFinder in the press

Is this the king of airfare search sites the aggregator of aggregators.

Travel site looks for errors that produce ultra-cheap air fares

Los angeles times, man creates travel website from his hospital bed and it's saving people millions, 'world's first meta-meta flight search' to be better than google, the telegraph, cheap flight deals to popular cities, trending cities on flightsfinder, san pedro sula, guatemala city, montego bay, port au prince, port of spain, cheap flight deals to popular countries, trending countries on flightsfinder, cayman islands, latest from our blog, news, reviews, tips and fun facts.

Discover 9 top tips on how to save money on airfare, describing which sites to compare to how to handy luggage tips.

Here is a useful infographic design that is packed with information about how wars can affect the cost of flights around the world.

Use our new airport stress calculator to determine how much stress your going to experience on your particular flight.

Explore More

• NORTH AMERICA
• MIDDLE EAST
• AUSTRALIA / OCEANIA
• SOUTH AMERICA
• Flights to USA
• Flights to Atlanta
• Flights to Austin
• Flights to Boston
• Flights to California
• Flights to Charlotte
• Flights to Chicago
• Flights to Dallas
• Flights to Denver
• Flights to Detroit
• Flights to Florida
• Flights to Fort Lauderdale
• Flights to Hawaii
• Flights to Houston
• Flights to Honolulu
• Flights to Las Vegas
• Flights to Los Angeles
• Flights to Miami
• Flights to Nashville
• Flights to Newark
• Flights to New York
• Flights to New Orleans
• Flights to Orlando
• Flights to Phoenix
• Flights to Philadelphia
• Flights to San Francisco
• Flights to San Diego
• Flights to Seattle
• Flights to Salt lake city
• Flights to Tampa
• Flights to Texas
• Flights to Washington
• Flights to Canada
• Flights to Toronto
• Flights to Vancouver
• Flights to Montreal
• Flights to Calgary
• Flights to Ottawa
• Flights to Jamaica
• Flights to Aruba
• Flights to Bahamas
• Flights to Cancun
• Flights to Dominican Republic
• Flights to Europe
• Flights to Austria
• Flights to Vienna
• Flights to Croatia
• Flights to Dubrovnik
• Flights to Cyprus
• Flights to Prague
• Flights to Denmark
• Flights to Copenhagen
• Flights to Finland
• Flights to France
• Flights to Paris
• Flights to Germany
• Flights to Berlin
• Flights to Greece
• Flights to Athens
• Flights to Hungary
• Flights to Budapest
• Flights to Iceland
• Flights to Ireland
• Flights to Dublin
• Flights to Italy
• Flights to Rome
• Flights to Milan
• Flights to Malta
• Flights to Amsterdam
• Flights to Norway
• Flights to Poland
• Flights to Portugal
• Flights to Lisbon
• Flights to Romania
• Flights to Spain
• Flights to Barcelona
• Flights to Madrid
• Flights to Sweden
• Flights to Switzerland
• Flights to Geneva
• Flights to Zurich
• Flights to Turkey
• Flights to Istanbul
• Flights to UK
• Flights to London
• Flights to Edinburgh
• Flights to Asia
• Flights to China
• Flights to Beijing
• Flights to Shanghai
• Flights to Hong Kong
• Flights to India
• Flights to Delhi
• Flights to Indonesia
• Flights to Japan
• Flights to Tokyo
• Flights to Macau
• Flights to Malaysia
• Flights to Nepal
• Flights to Pakistan
• Flights to Islamabad
• Flights to Philippines
• Flights to Manila
• Flights to Singapore
• Flights to Sri Lanka
• Flights to Thailand
• Flights to Bangkok
• Flights to Vietnam
• Flights to Middle East
• Flights to Qatar
• Flights to Saudi Arabia
• Flights to Jeddah
• Flights to UAE
• Flights to Dubai
• Flights to Abu Dhabi
• Flights to Australia
• Flights to Sydney
• Flights to Melbourne
• Flights to New Zealand
• Flights to Africa
• Flights to Morocco
• Flights to Egypt
• Flights to South Africa
• Flights to Johannesburg
• Flights to Cape Town
• Flights to Kenya
• Flights to Nigeria
• Flights to South America
• Flights to Argentina
• Flights to Brazil

Expert Help

Choose Site / Currency