hi and welcome to the channel if you new here my name is Megan and on this channel you'll find weekly videos some have related to travel in today's video we'll be talking about how to effectively search on Google flights including filters and features as well as answering common questions like if taxes are included in the price or how to change the currency there's a lot of talk about using this time now to plan your next adventure and about the incredible travel deals to come when ever travel opens up again however these deals are no good
to us if we don't know where or how to search for them tuning in for the next 10 minutes could end up saving you hundreds on your next adventure and prepare you to snag the very best travel deals in the coming months start by opening up Google flights in your browser this is going to be a basic overview perfect for someone that is new to Google flights or that it's new to searching and booking travel online altogether I'll go through all the features and filters that make Google flights the most powerful tool for finding cheap
flight once you have Google flights open scroll all the way to the bottom and just check that the language country and currency is correct I have Canadian but for the purposes of this video I will be using USD [Music] a basic flight search is going to consist of your departure your destination your dates your trip type the passenger count and then the fare class when it comes to your departure and then also your destination you can put in an entire city and Airport a country or even a whole region something that I particularly love about
Google flights is that you can actually search multiple locations so you can search up to six different departure and six different arrival cities so by doing that you just add another one type in anywhere else you may want to go this is great if you're between multiple destinations and you haven't decided and want to see what the best flights are and also great if you happen to live near multiple airports so in my case I would put Ottawa but I would also consider flights out of Montreal depending on what was going to be the best
deal now when you search Google flights is going to search every single combination between Ottawa Bangkok Ottawa Hanoi Montreal Bangkok Montreal Hanoi and so on to find you the best place and then it's going to give you the suggested flights listed in order of precedence here and then just so you know the price that you're seeing this u.s. dollars 741 is going to be the total price for the entire trip so from your home to your destination back to your home again with all of the taxes included the price that you see is the price
that you will pay to keep this simple I'm going to leave the search in at just Ottawa to Bangkok I want to show you that as we go through and we change these different features it's going to be updating the place automatically as you can see it already is here next you can look at the type of trip round trip which is from your home to your destination back to your home again is typically going to be the cheapest way to book you can also look at doing a one-way flight which is quite self-explanatory and
then also a multi-city multi-city is great if you want to go away and then explore multiple locations so you may go Ottawa to Bangkok Bangkok to Hanoi and then add a flight that's going to take you from Hanoi back home again by booking a flight like this you may think it's going to be more but it's often not it's usually cheaper to book multi-city than it is to book multiple one-way flights as I mentioned before a simple round-trip is probably going to get you the best deal then you also want to look at passenger count
if you are traveling as more than one person definitely input it now it would suck if you searched for a flight got the price for it booked the flight then realized it was the last ticket and your travel partner couldn't come with you as well updating these filters the prices are going to be updating here so in this case if you're searching a round-trip flight for two passengers this is going to be the total price for both of you to fly to the destination and home again in the currency that you selected at the bottom
next we have the fare class unfortunately you can only select one of these to search at a time if you're looking for the cheapest flights you're going to want to stick with just economy the final factor of a basic search is going to be your dates so you'll click this blue calendar right here and you'll first want to reset the dates and then you'll notice that departure date has been highlighted this is what Google flights can really show you that just by changing your dates by one day you can end up saving hundreds of dollars
the numbers that you see here in green are going to be the total price for the round-trip and the ones that are in green are the ones that Google is telling you is the best deal for that to put your dates based on the length of your trip which you can change down here let's say you have a one week vacation this is a short vacation to go to Bangkok but for this example it will be fine so you have seven days to play with if you can leave any time during this week you would
select the fourth because it's going to be the cheapest flight once you click on it you'll now notice that the return date is highlighted and then the prices that you're seeing are going to be the round-trip price if you were to return on that day so exactly seven days later we're getting the cheapest flight Kia at seven hundred and seventy six US dollars if you are happy with that flight you would click on it and then hit done so we're now searching Ottawa to Bangkok for one passenger on a round-trip in Economy for these specific
dates and then these are going to be the best flights the cheapest flights that Google is recommending to us if you are flexible with your dates or with your trip length you're going - love the date grid and the price graph we'll start with the date grid this is probably my favorite feature on all of Google flights what they have along the top here is a full week of when you could possibly depart and then down on the y-axis it's going to be all of your possible return dates if you decide you can leave later
or sooner return sooner you can change these and just play around what Google flights is doing here is they're showing you in red the most expensive gray the ones in the middle and then green the ones we want to pay attention to which is going to be the cheapest round-trip place all taxes included Google flights goes a step further and it's going to highlight in green the best deals on the page that you're viewing you'll want to look for the flights that are green and then highlighted in green and when you select on that it's
going to be the intersection of the x axis and the y axis that is going to be a departure in your level so here we would be leaving on February 3rd and we would be returning back home on February 11th and those look like they're the best places for our date range next you can look at the price graph the price graph is great if you have flexibility on your dates you have to have a specific trip length if you know you have seven days of vacation to use but you can use that vacation anytime
you can then set the trip length to seven days and you'll be able to see what days would be the cheapest for you to go and take this trip to Bangkok so here it would make sense if we were leaving on Tuesday the 4th and then any of these days here would also be cheap if you wanted to leave later on the 24th of February and so on you can easily see based on your trip length when it is going to be the cheapest time to take that vacation next year we have airports so it's
telling you if those airports that are nearby your destination so we're flying into Bangkok's main airport here but there's another airport that's about a 40 minute drive away from the main airport which is dong Hmong international so you can also click Add Airport here and it's going to get you the best price for the two of these so if it's cheaper to fly into dong Hmong they will show you flights that are flying into Dong Mong guarantee it's not going to be cheaper because they do a lot of domestic flights and flights around Asia it's
gonna leave that for now and then finally up here you have tips tips usually doesn't help you with booking cheap flights but it may give you some insight into the destination that you're going to but now we're just going to ignore this all of these options the nearby airports price graph and date grid can be found here as well another great feature with Google flights is if you scroll down a little bit more and hit the drop down our here it's going to tell you what the price is in comparison to the history of this
exact flight on this dates it's going to give you some insight into whether or not it's a good time to book this flight sometimes you can wait one day and the flight is gonna jump by a couple hundred dollars and then you come back the next day and it's 300 dollars cheaper it really depends so here it's showing you the price history so you can see over time historically about how much people are paying for this exact same flight at the moment it's telling us the prices are relatively typical and because this flight is coming
up in a week from now it's probably only going to be getting more and more expensive if you were to wait it would be a pretty good time to be booking this flight today if you're not ready to book you can also head up here and you can use the track prices feature it's going to monitor the lowest price for this trip and then it will send you a price alert by email anytime there's a price change by putting it on your now subscribe so if this flight suddenly went down to $700 you would be
immediately notified and you'd be able to book it on the spot you may not see this track prices option if you are not logged into your Google account next I'll briefly run through these filters and why they're actually quite important to pay attention to depending on your own situation if you are planning to bring multiple bags with you add them here it's now going to give you the best price based on that number of bags sometimes an airline will end up charging you 60 70 US dollars to bring extra bags with you so Google flights
is going to give you the best price for the number of bags that you need stops is going to be how many lay overs you have direct flights would be no stops only they're going to be the fastest but also the most expensive it's great out here because there are fortunately no direct flights from Ottawa to Bangkok here you have to decide if the money is more worth it to you or if the time is more worth it to you the more stops the more time-consuming it's going to be I also have heard a statistic
that about 80% of complications with the airplane happen on takeoff and landing so the more stops you have the more chance there is for a complication just something else to think about here you can decide which airlines or which alliances you would like to book with specifically and then it will only show you those flights you can select only if you only wanted to fly with Air Canada and you can go through and choose any others that you'd like you can select all Airlines or none and then if you collect points with a specific alliance
you can filter it so they only show flights with that alliance price here you can set the maximum you're willing to pay I usually don't touch this I just look at what Google is suggesting and see the lowest prices times might be important if there is a certain time of day that you're able to leave by if you don't want to leave overnight for example - and then if there's a specific time that you need to be at your arrival destination maybe you have a dinner to make or a conference you can do the same
for your return connecting airports stopover duration is going to be how long you're willing to spend at a single layover layover is can be 24 hours 48 hours five hours so you can set a specific maximum amount by leaving any you're opening yourself up to finding the cheapest flights although you may end up with an unreasonably long layover I like to leave all of them just to see all of my options as for connecting airports I also actually do use this feature I often won't want to fly through the US if my final destination is
outside of the US because when you buy health insurance it's sometimes jumps the price just because you're traveling through a u.s. airport so I may filter out US last option here is the flight duration so it's how long you're willing to spend in transit this is not the flight duration of one specific flight or how long you're in the air for it's going to be the length of your total trip so here for example the total trip duration is 25 hours and 20 minutes from when the airplane takes off in Ottawa - when it arrives
and touches down in Bank including my stop in Toronto and in Japan the total trip length will be 25 hours including all of those flights and all of those lay overs I often will filter because sometimes you can find a very cheap flight but it's going to give you a layover somewhere of 24 hours which means you're having to book a hotel anyway and that will end up costing you whatever you end up saving on that ticket the final option here is to show separate tickets or to hide separate tickets here you can determine whether
or not you're open to flying on separately booked tickets for example you would fly out to a destination on one airline and then return home to your destination on another airline or you may fly part of your trip with one airline and then the next part with another airline the only thing is that the ticket is going to be booked separately that means you would have to check in for the flight separately it means you wouldn't be able to go straight through connections if your second leg was with a different airline you would need to
go through security all over again and you would need to get your bag and then recheck your bag so it's up to you I usually leave show separate tickets as highlighted it will only show you separate ticket booking if the price is going to be significantly cheaper so I usually leave it selected but I'm rarely ever shown the option if it is going to be a separate ticket you will be made aware that it is a separate ticket one other thing to note here is that if you do end up adding multiple departures or arrival
airports if you put those in and you pull up the price graph or the date grid it's now showing you the best prices for every combination of departure and every combination of arrival Google flights is by far the most flexible tool to find and book the best flight deals it's been my go-to for years and has scored me half a dozen round trips to Asia for under $700 each in an effort not to completely overload you with information in my next video I'll be covering how to actually make a booking as well as answering questions
like if flights are refundable and including bonus tips to make sure that you always get the best deal let me know in the comments if you've ever Google flights to search for deals don't forget to give this video a thumbs up thank you and then hit subscribe so we can meet back here again next week have a good one bye
