Part of being able to get the best airfare is learning all the tricks that you can do with Google flights. Google flights has some really amazing and cool things that will help you explore different regions of the world, and different air fares. So I'm going to show you a few right now. Let's start with this function called search or region. So for example, maybe you know that you want to go to a certain region, but you're not quite sure of the country, or you want to compare different countries or even different regions, you can start with a really wide search by looking for flights in a particular region, continent and so forth. So let's just say we're thinking about somewhere in Asia.

I know I said in the earlier lecture that my travel goal included going to Thailand for that purpose. And so what we can do is start with a broader search, which is looking at Asia. Maybe we're thinking of Thailand. We're not sure if we want to do Vietnam, Cambodia, Hong Kong, we're not sure. So what we can do is go to google.com and type in flights to Asia. Okay, do a search.

And then here where the flights tab is we click on that. And let's try to think about some dates. I know now we're just exploring, we haven't set anything in stone. But maybe we're thinking about November, we want to go in a couple of months. So we can actually just let's say November 1, and say returning somewhere around November 15. Okay.

So what you can do is actually click on this map and what will come up are some of the airlin errors fares for different cities, if you can see here, right? So we have Hong Kong at 745, Beijing at 603, Hong Kong, Tokyo at 924, New Delhi, Mumbai. Even Dubai is here. We have all kinds of flights, not every single city and I'm sure if we clicked on a certain city that we were interested in, we could actually for this purposes, it says unknown fare, but we could go in searches specifically. Okay. So it just gives you a way to compare different cities and what the prices are to fly there from your desktop from your origination city so you can see what the prices are and what compares so maybe you just said I want to go somewhere anywhere in Asia, I just wanted to be the cheapest flight for the time period that I'm looking at.

So that's a good way to check for that. So another thing you can do is hit this tab that says I'm feeling lucky. And so that's sort of like this, you know, shot in the dark where they pick something for you. And it's based both on your own search history. So things that you've searched for in terms of your flights, but also what's trending. And so they kind of have the they picked out when I hit what I'm feeling lucky what Google flights picked out for me is Osaka, Japan, which I've been to, by the way, and it's an amazing city.

So at that time of the year, I'm feeling lucky came up with Osaka, Japan at $898 round trip. That's not too bad, right. And then you can see here that you actually get information on some of the hotel options as well, because we gave you some tips about getting your own accommodations. You wouldn't necessarily jump at this as the first way to book but it's good to see what some of the prices are And then you also see information here about different accommodations that you could click on. Okay castles, the art galleries, and so forth. So that's a, you know, fun tool to use, I'm feeling lucky.

The next thing you could do is if you actually have a specific itinerary that you're looking at, so for example, if you have a conference to go to, so I went to a conference in Melbourne, Australia once, so let's pick that. And let's say that this conference is actually in December, for whatever reason, right? So it's around December 8, and it's just for the weekend, but I'll stay a little longer for a few extra days and come back on the 15th. Right. And it's from Philadelphia. So what you can do is do that search and it will actually be come up with the best flights.

All right, so here's some of the options. The best flights that are listed up here, all of them aren't necessarily the cheapest flights. What Google flights does is take into account things like your layover time, when you would be departing, when you would be returning and trying to configure all of that into the best flights. Certainly, one of the best flights is the cheapest, but a few of them are a little more expensive, so they give you some options. So you can look at that here. The other thing you can do is if you do have a bit of flexibility around your dates, you can just actually click on the calendar.

So you can see you can click here flexible, you have flexible dates, what you can see is the different prices for departing on a particular day. See here, so I said I wanted to leave on the eighth. However, if I leave on the fifth The seventh, the price goes from 1624 down to 1508. If I leave a day later on the ninth it actually goes up. If I leave a couple of days earlier on the sixth, it goes down by $500. So you can use this calendar to see how your price might change based on changes in your travel dates.

And the same here you can look at departure and return dates to see how they might differ depending on what you change. Okay, the other thing that Google flights does is you can search that manually four changes based on your days, but they have a date tip up here. So for this ticket, you actually save $509 if you return on Wednesday, December 13th, instead of Friday, December 15. So still leaving on the eighth but coming back a little bit early. On the 13th, you save a whole lot of money. So they'll always give you that tip to be able to see how your price might change.

And there are a few other tips so your price could change. I have myself leaving from Philadelphia, but Newark Airport, which is just about an hour and a half away, saves a little bit of money. If you fly in Premium Economy, it's a little more expensive, but you get a higher class of service, okay? And this is a flight leaving with Emirates. And it's a different date and it's a little bit higher, but some people like that particular airline. So it gives you these different tips about what could change in price depending on what you change in terms of the class of your airline, the actual airline, the airport you leave from or the date that you leave.

All right, so you can look at the calendar You can also look at the dates. The other things thing you can do is track the price. So you can toggle this, click here. And this will actually track the price of this, this, this trip for these dates, and email you with information about when prices look to be going up when they're dropping. If it looks like a particular price that's being offered is ending at midnight tonight or something, you'll get these updates every day, that give you information about how the prices are likely to change. And if you are searching on your cell phone, you'll get those alerts those notifications on your phone.

So that's a really good way to sort of track things especially if you're just doing a little bit of a search early. You're not interested in purchasing right now. You're just doing some research trying to find out and you'll get a sense of when you should buy. So that's really good. I use that I always use alerts when I'm using kayak, Google flights or any other app. The other thing you can do is if you have a particular itinerary that you are going to choose so I saw all of the flight options and I chose one particular flight option, I can actually track the price the historical price of this particular flight itinerary.

Sometimes people like to do this, if they take a certain flight or route all the time either for work or they travel to a conference every you know, a meeting every two months or conference every year or and they're in a long distance relationship or something like that something that they're taking a particular itinerary regularly, and they want to understand the price history and how the pricing varies or fluctuates for this itinerary. So you can do that with the history. Another thing you can do is you can search all kinds of things almost like a travel agent in Google flights. So sometimes you can actually discover destinations similar to what we did by searching a region. But maybe you have some dates. So you might have a holiday weekend coming up.

So for example, the 13th to the 17th of September, and you're wide open, you're saying, let me just find out information about any place. And then you can actually look at destinations interests. So there's adventure travel, beaches, culture, ecotourism, food, honeymoon, and so forth. So let's say I'm interested in ecotourism. This is a way to actually discover different destinations. So there's Cape Town in South Africa, amazing picture, right?

And they have safaris, they have penguins. They have wine, tasting jazz. There's information here about the Flight. Okay hotel information, and more information you can click on about the particular activity. So information here about whale watching. So you can actually just use this to discover places that you may not have even been thinking about to see what's offered in their different tourism industries, what the flight prices are, like, what the hotel prices are like, and so forth.

You know, look at Amman, Jordan, there's Johannesburg or near Johannesburg. So let's look at Jordan. Some of the hotels here, the flight prices, all of those are here and they're available for you to see. So this is a really cool way again to explore and this is for the traveler who's not necessarily sure where they want to go, but they just want to start exploring and start to accumulate some of the knowledge that flight attendants excuse me that travel agents have is a real Really, really cool tool. So I've been on Google flights sometimes for hours at a time, just searching different dates, different flights and different destinations. So go ahead, try it for yourself and have some fun