Google has entered the travel arena once again with Google Flights, its new airline ticket aggregator. The website has a contract with ITA Software for its existence, which is hotly contested by potential competitors. Despite this, Google was undeterred by the dissatisfaction of the new cohorts and Hotel Finder and Flights officially debuted.
We’ve already looked at how Google Hotel Finder stacks up against the competition, and now we’re going to include Google Flights.
User interface
Google flights
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Like Hotel Finder, Google Flights is incredibly minimalistic and uses a lot of white space. It has the same new look as Google Search, and the left side of the page offers tabs to help you narrow down your results. Flights uses a map to visually show you your potential flight and includes drop-down filters that allow you to view flights based on their length and price.
Flights are undeniably easy to navigate. The lack of ads (we assume for now) means your focus is on search. Results fall below your query by departure time. We’d rather automatically show flights by price, which is generally a key point for consumers. You can decide which qualifying flights they will be listed on, including price, of course. But the wording Google uses here is a bit odd: clicking “Round trip” will show your options by their price. You could probably tell as much just by looking at the page, but it’s not as clear as if the category was simply labeled “Price.”
Kayak
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By most comparisons, Kayak has a pretty sparse site that’s free of clutter and distractions, but coming from Google Flights, it almost looks too busy. This is mostly because Kayak puts some of its features up front, while Flights hides them behind icons and in drop-down menus. Kayak’s “Flexible Calendar” and the option to see the best fares found by others can be found on the right side of the page, next to your actual search.
The search itself is as simple as it should be. We like the map provided by Google Flights – it breaks up the text well. While the flexible date feature and indicators (such as the type of class you’re looking for and whether you want to skip layovers) might seem like asking too many questions compared to the simplicity of Google Flights, it’s probably a quicker end to your flight search.
The search part of Kayak is fine, but it’s the user interface with the results we’re not interested in. Instead of a drop-down menu, you are redirected to a new page full of ads, a sidebar to customize your travel conditions, a flexible calendar of days and finally your results. It’s a really busy page to look at, but we’re glad the left bar keeps you from going back to the home page to change your search.
Bing Travel
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Google is not the only search company looking to profit from the online travel market. The competitor site has been around for several years on Google and has tons of features to prove it. It looks remarkably similar to Google Flights – at first. The search box part of the page looks similar, but Bing puts all the sitemaps on the table. Everything you could want to use from Bing Travel is on the surface: last minute flight deals, low fare search engines, price predictions. These are all very interesting things, but they clutter the page and definitely distract from what could otherwise be a very clean layout.
After searching, a pop-up window shows a summary of your flight, which you can postpone or select a more detailed list. The latter redirects you to a new page, which automatically displays your options by price.
Bing’s user interface looks like the love child of Google Flights and Kayak. It wants to have clean lines and white space without sacrificing the various features that Kayak puts in the margins of its site. The result is a less defined results section.
Features
Google flights
- Left Margin: Most features for narrowing flight results are on the left side of the page – as is the case with Kayak and Bing Travel. However, Google chooses a different, cleaner format and one that only appears after you start your query. Here you specify how many stops your flight will have, the airline, connections and time specifications. Clicking on those categories opens a drop-down menu (a layout that Google apparently likes) to choose from.
- Calendar: More interesting Google Flights tools can be found via the icons below the central map. One of them is the calendar. Selection pulls down the month of your flight, highlights your specific dates, and then displays the lowest fare at that time for five-day trips. You can turn this on to find the lowest price if you have flexible travel arrangements. It’s simple and clean, and our only gripe is that the calendar icon doesn’t necessarily mean it’s about finding cheap tickets.
- Limits: The Limits Tool is an interactive chart that lets you control your score with sliders that determine how much you want to pay and how long you want to fly. The dots on the chart are groups of available flights and it’s actually pretty cool to visually spot one or two perfect options. It might not be the fastest way to find a flight, but it’s fun to play with.
Kayak
Flexible Dates: As soon as you start the search, a flexible dates calendar appears with cheap dates in the near future, highlighting the cheapest of all.- Comparison: Unlike Google Flights, Kayak offers the ability to compare its results with those of its competitors. You can choose to view (in new windows – we wish they could all be brought together in one window) options from Priceline, Expedia, Travelocity, Hotwire, CheapOair, and more.
- Price Alert: If your travel arrangements are not set in stone, you can choose to be notified of discounts on tickets to your destination in the near future.
- Fare Charts: Like the Google Flights calendar, this shows when prices are falling and rising, and conveniently appears above the page instead of redirecting you.
Bing Travel
- Comparison: Like Kayak, Bing offers comparisons with competing sites. You can specify whether you want to see results from Expedia, Travelocity, Priceline, Hotwire, and BookingBuddy. Kayak actually had issues with Bingo playing copy several years ago.
- Low Fare Searcher: On the flight search home page there is an option to forgo the normal search setting and go to the low fare date search engine below. This redirects you to a map showing the cheapest tickets by departure date. Even better, Bing offers arrows that show whether individual airfares are rising or falling so you can determine whether you should act fast or use a little patience, part of its price prediction service and perhaps our favorite feature the site offers.
- Multiple Routes: This is another innovative tool that Bing deserves praise for. In addition to the low price search engine, you can enter departure and arrival cities and choose to find more routes. This then shows you the prices of trips to multiple destinations. It’s obviously the feature that’s most useful for vacation planning, but a map that shows all your options is fun and easy to use.
Price Forecast: This is basically a guide to help you plan your airfare. It helps you determine when is the best time to buy a ticket, and also guides you through the various features on the site and how they can help you in your search.- Last minute flights: The last minute flight list reminds us of Expedia, which seems to throw out emails of cheap flights by the minute. It’s still useful if you’re keeping an eye on the weekend away, and includes a price prediction icon.
Case Study: Chicago
Time to put these three to the test. Here’s our experience using Google Flights, Kayak, and Bing Travel to book a 2- or 3-day trip to Chicago, IL. We decided to make the dates flexible, sometime in the next month.
Google flights
The first thing we noticed about Google Flights was how quickly it returned results for the weekend of September 24th. Almost instantly, we had nearly two dozen results to browse, starting at $545. Since we have a flexible travel schedule, we pulled the calendar to play with the weather a little. It turned out that if we left two days later than originally stated, we would get a cheaper ticket. Just for fun, we decided to play around with the limit feature as well and discovered an even cheaper deal that came in earlier for $295.
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Wanting to reschedule the flight for September 26th, we clicked on the price to book it and were redirected to Frontier’s site. Unfortunately, there was no direct link to book a flight right away. Instead, we would have to search again for the specific flight on Frontier’s site. It didn’t take long and we found a flight for a total of $294.80.
- Time: 10 to 15 minutes
- Final price and departure date: $294.80, September 26
- Possibilities: 58
Kayak
After telling Kayak that we wanted to go from PDX to any airport in Chicago, we immediately looked at the calendar with the best fares on the right. We immediately saw that there was a flight on September 27th for $295. But clicking on it did nothing, so we moved on.
It was slower than Google flights, but not a painful lag by any means. There were now many more options than Google Flights: Kayak has made more than 2,000 round trips. Google might be faster and sleeker, but Kayak’s wealth of results is a big tip in its favor.
Of course, the caveat is that watching Kayak was like a thorn in the side. All the options, calendars and ads didn’t encourage us to use everything the site has to offer. It actually just made us want to pick the best option and go from there.
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After selecting a ticket, we were redirected to CheapTickets, where the final total price was $294.80.
- Time: 15 to 20 minutes
- Final price and departure date: $294.80, September 26
- Options: 2000+
Bing Travel
Before we even hit “search flights” on Bing, we went to the lowest fares feature at the bottom of the page. The site displayed results faster than Kayak but slower than Google Flights and offered 210 options. The first was a $295 flight from Portland to Chicago… on October 4th. Trying to find a date closer to the other two we found turned out to be more arduous than we thought. On the eighth page, we found a flight on route 26 for $304. We appreciated the price predictor, which said the price was going up.
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Selecting it led to a short wait and then took us to the $312 options. We were redirected and the total cost was $311.80
- Time: 15 to 20 minutes
- Final price and departure date: $311.80, September 26
- Possibilities: About 200
Categories: GAMING
Source: newstars.edu.vn