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United and JetBlue planes crowd the taxiway at Laguardia Airport in New York City’s Queens borough.
Bruce Bennet | Getty Images
Googling can help you save money ahead of the holiday season. You can use Google Flights to track the price of airline tickets for a trip you’re interested in and receive notifications when costs change.
The tool can save you hundreds of dollars and prevent you from having to constantly look up ticket prices.
Better yet, you can set Google Flights to check flight prices weeks or months before you actually need to book your trip. I’ve used it before and it saved me over $500 on a cross-country flight.
I’ve found it especially useful if you’re unsure about traveling and have a tight ceiling on how much you’re willing to spend on a ticket. For example, if you’re considering a vacation trip but only want to buy tickets at a specific price, turn on the tracker and you’ll be notified if the price of a flight drops to stay within your budget.
Keep in mind that flights typically get more expensive the closer to your departure date, so you’ll want to set the alert as early as possible.
How to save money with Google Flights
Enable or disable the highlighted area at the top of the page to receive alerts for specific dates.
Googling
- Go to the Google Flights website and log in to your Google account.
- Select your departure and destination airports, as well as the dates you want to travel.
- Press ‘Search’. You will see all available flights.
- From here you have a number of different options depending on the route you want.
- To post a price breakdown on all flights to and from your destination within your desired travel date range, enable the button to the right of ‘Track Prices’.
- Once that dot turns blue, you’ll get a pop-up at the bottom of the page that says “You’ll receive emails when prices change” for your dates.
- If you have some flexibility in your itinerary, you can press the dot to the right of “All Dates” instead. That alerts you when prices are low.
- You can also set a price tracker for a specific flight. To do that, choose the departing and returning flights you want to receive alerts for and enable the option to track prices.
Google can tell you the price history of flights.
Googling
Pro tip: When you’re ready to travel, make sure you check the price history. It’s a drop-down list that appears below your search. And shows a green, yellow and red bar that gives you an indication of whether your flight is cheaper than normal, priced at usual rates or more expensive than normal.
