Even though I’ve booked my fair share of flights through Kayak, Hotwire, Booking.com, and Expedia, I’ve found more over the years through Google Flights than all of the other airfare aggregators combined. Even Skyscanner doesn’t point me to the best deal on a chosen route as often as Google Flights.

Google announced Flight Deals, an AI-powered flight searcher, on August 14. What makes it unique is that you don’t have to input dates or destinations during your search for trip ideas.

You can put in your date range specifically or, if you like, loosely (show me flights during the dry season), your price range, and other flight details, and then just describe the type of trip you want.

Places where you can see the Northern Lights? Places along the old Hippie Trail? Places that are known as meccas for meditation? Flight Deals will crunch all the information and then show you a spread of ideas.

perfect for the indecisive among us

Sometimes you just know you need a vacation. You want to get away, and that’s the origin point for your vacation search, without knowing where you want to go. The aforementioned Skyscanner is a regular tool of mine for such instances, although it doesn’t often hit the mark for me.

With Flight Deals, I could just type something like, “Give me recommendations for places in Asia where I can drive on one of the world’s most beautiful motorcycle roads, and with airfare that costs less than $1,000.”

Boom. Out popped a number of recommendations that adhere to the pricing demands and are located in countries known for beautiful motorcycling roads, including one that I can vouch for. Vietnam is known for its motorcycling roads, and they are indeed beautiful.

Google’s rolling out Flight Deals as a public beta in the US, Canada, and India. There’s no need to sign up, though. You can just go to Flight Deals and start using it. Being a beta, you can expect new features to debut in the future.

“We’re adding a new option to exclude basic economy fares for trips in the U.S. and Canada,” says Google in their announcement post, although they don’t say when to expect it.

There’s no reason you couldn’t fire up ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude on your own and ask it the same questions about ideas for where you should travel. But by incorporating Gemini into Flight Deals, Google takes a step out of the already convoluted process of booking a flight.