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Google’s New Personalized Travel Features Basically Make It a $0 Travel Agent

Tehrene Firman

January 8, 2020

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Google is great at making life easier—especially when it comes to traveling. Take Google Flights, for instance. It's basically made the once-stressful process of finding the cheapest flight online an easy, breezy process. Now combined with the newly-added features for hotel booking, it basically becomes the Google travel agent of your dreams—one that's always at your beck and call.

The next time you visit google.com/travel, you'll see a handful of new features that help you plan your vacation from start to finish. There's a "when to visit" tab that shows you how weather and pricing varies throughout the year, and a "what you'll pay" tab that allows you to see if the prices are low, typical, or high on the dates you're contemplating your stay.

There are also helpful personalized results. You'll be able to see if you've stayed at—or have searched for—a certain hotel before, and can see hotels similar to options you've already stayed at in other cities. You'll also be able to see hotels that are nearby points of interests you've searched for. So if you've been Googling Broadway showtimes in New York City or trying to find the best slice of pizza in Chicago, it will show you a line-up of hotels you could stay in the area.

Another great feature is the ability to resume planning your trip over time. When you close your browser, you don't lose everything you just did. You'll be able to access everything again—including recent searches and things you've saved for destinations on your bucket list—once you're back on. If this isn't a sign that 2020 is going to be your most adventurous year yet, I don't know what is.

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