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By Craig Stoltz, October 17, 2025
You’re Not Using Google Right to Plan Your Trips
Artificial intelligence is expanding the ways in which the search engine can help save you time and money when planning and booking travel—if you know how to use the new tools correctly.
Earlier this year, Google search debuted an AI Mode created to respond in conversational language to users’ questions on just about any topic under the sun, including travelers’ queries about places to go and things to do. Ask it for a “romantic Santa Fe weekend in March” or “wineries to visit in Croatia” and it will zing out ideas and rough, often rather accurate itineraries that get vacation planning started.
While most people access the itinerary function just by using AI Mode in Google search, more informed users would be wise to use the Gemini app. There’s a paid version, but the majority of consumers will get all the information they need from the free version. Gemini offers additional tools (detailed below) and a better chat interface, taking full advantage of Google’s ability to connect users to the search behemoth’s well-established travel planning services—Google Flights, Google Hotels, and Google Maps—and incorporating its stored search data about users to refine its results.
“The ability to pull live data about travel products from Google Travel while integrating its answers with data from your Google search history, Maps, Gmail, and YouTube make it an end-to-end experience that’s hard for other platforms to match,” says Mike Coletta, senior manager of research and innovation at Phocuswright, a travel consulting firm.
In other words, Google offers a lot more than simple AI-generated itineraries for travel, and more than most other bots can muster to help travel planners. Here’s how to make the most of Google’s AI travel planning tools.
Find flights by chatting
Travelers can use the Gemini app to specify what they are looking for in natural language. For instance, you can go to the Gemini app and explain your flight needs as follows: “Find me nonstop flights to London from Washington, D.C., the week of January 10th. Show a grid of choices and links to book them.”
Gemini will show you basic choices and send you to Google Flights with a running start. “The balanced blend of conversational search with traditional filters and inputs” makes the process much easier and better, says Coletta. Other services don’t have access to Google’s real-time flight data.
Dream big with Google Flight Deals
The recently launched AI-powered Google Flight Deals tool sounds like a way to find cheap fares, and it is. But its super power is that it’s a dream weaver with a budget brain. Try this: Don’t specify a destination. Just tell it “romantic Caribbean vacation long weekend in February from Philly, not too expensive.”
You’d expect Jamaica and the Dominican Republic to appear, and they do. But right at the top is Providenciales in the Turks & Caicos Islands, selling for 41 percent less than usual as of this writing. Suddenly you’re dreaming of an entirely different Caribbean getaway.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: The Best Ways to Use Google’s AI Tools for Travel Planning – AFAR
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