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Over the past month, I have covered flight tips, how to use points for travel, and ways to earn Delta Skymiles without flying. However if you don’t have any points or miles to use, I am sure you still want to get to your destination as cheap as possible. This is where Google flights comes in. Knowing how to use Google flights will help you get good deals. In today’s Wanderlust Wednesday post, I will cover how to use Google flights so you can get to your next destination without spending a fortune.

Personally, I use Google Flights as my main source for booking flights.
Google flights is perfect for the traveler who wants to know how to find the best flight deals without miles, credit card points, or loyalty status. I wrote about Google Flights previously here, but there have been many changes warranting a new post.

Google flights has many helpful features but I’ll narrow it down to those that are likely most useful.

Google flights acts like a travel agent

When you input your dates and location that you are traveling from/to, Google Flights will select the “best” flight based on the combination of price and duration. This best option will always be highlighted in the top of the search function.

Although it provides first the best options, you can still filter by specific airline, departure or arrival times, and number of stops.

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Here you can see it chose the “best” departure flights for Salt Lake City to Phoenix and highlighted these at the top.

The price calendar can alert you when there are better days to travel

Are you undecided about leaving Thursday night or Friday morning for your long weekend? How about returning on Sunday night or Monday? What if you want to go away for three days but you don’t care when it is as long as it’s the cheapest? The Google price calendar is very helpful for any of these things. You can see prices based off of the departure date that automatically update.

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This is giving me an idea of the days that would be cheapest to travel to my destination.

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Both of these screenshots show different ways to look at the pricing. The first is showing a grid of departure days and return days to help you match up your trip. The second screenshot is showing the pricing for the set number of days that you decided (in this instance it’s 3 days) for the entire month.

Don’t care where you’re heading? Google Flights can help with that too

One of my favorite ways to use Google flights is with the explore feature or by putting in a generalized location. This is often relevant for people who need to request vacation very far in advance of actually planning it. So when you know you have time off but you don’t care where you go this feature can help you figure out the locations you can go to that are the cheapest.

Guaranteed Flight Deals

Lastly the main reason to use Google Flights specifically in the next few weeks is the new Google Flight Price Guarantee. This is a new feature and only available for a limited time. This is actually not something I have used yet myself so you can find more details here.

Have any favorite Google Flights tips? Please share them in the comments!

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