Google Pushes AI ‘Flight Deals’ Globally, New Travel Features in Search

0:00Google has just rolled out its AI flights deal tool to the entire world. This is something that I think was internally in the US for a while. I've tested it and I've had some interesting results, which I will share on the podcast. But they've also added some new travel features inside of search, inside of Google search. We're getting into all of this today. Before we do, I wanted to tell everyone about our AI Hustle school community because we are currently doing a Black Friday deal. So on our school community, we post a video every week that we don't post anywhere else, breaking down the tools that we are using to grow and scale our businesses.

0:32We have a whole course on how to become an AI consultant inside of your own industry, which is really powerful. And we currently have a Black Friday deal where it is only$19 a month to join the school community. We have over 300 members that all share inputs and ideas what they're working on. We share our own personal projects, stuff we don't share publicly. And so if you want to join, there's a link in the description. It's$19 a month for this Black Friday month. If you want to get it, it is currently on sale. All right, let's talk about what's going on with Google Flights. Jamie, you are, you know, the flight deal finding master.

1:06Is this tool useful to you? What are your thoughts on it? Yeah, you know, I haven't, you know, traveled globally in quite a few years now, but in the past, you know, there's always been the new travel site that, oh, if you want the cheapest flights, you got to go to, you know, first it was Expedia, then it was Kayak. And then it's like, after over time, somehow these prices get twisted. And at the end of the day, it's really hard to know if you're getting the best price or not, because, you know, each company has their markups. That's how they make money. You know, they're, they're, you know, it's, it's very convoluted, but now Google has actually been dominating with their flight deals.

1:43This has been, you know, in development for the past few months, but basically it will search all these sites and actually find you the cheapest deal. And I know it works. My mom actually was trying to help her plan a trip to switzerland because her step granddaughter is going to be studying abroad there and you know the flight that we found is like 200 cheaper than anywhere else it was like wow you know like 600 round trip to switzerland from michigan so it was you know crazy um it really does work and what's really cool is not just will it find you the cheapest flights is they actually have this new canvas feature where you can actually plan out your trip.

2:24So, you know, from these dates, you know, I'm going to be in Geneva. And so I need a hotel, you know, from these days. And it kind of gives you a visual to help you plan your trip and make all those connections. So it's never been easier to plan a trip now with this, this new tool. And I think travel agents may be in trouble in the future with their, their businesses because of how easy it is now using this tool. Yeah, so I've personally tried it before. And I will say my first experience with it was disappointing, but I probably had too high of expectations. Because it was like, you know, talk to us like chat GPT.

3:00And I'm like, Okay, I have like a family of five, and we want to travel like somewhere in this range, we want to go to like somewhere like here. And preferably, we want to sit at like this part of the airplane. And like, we want to like, anyways, I had like 100 like stipulations. And I'm like, go. And it's like, yeah, sorry, we can't, we can't do that. So I think I probably was going a little overboard, which like, I think to be fair, if you use chat GPT and their Expedia plugin, like you can do a little bit more if you like you can kind of do that with with that tool. So I'll say that I will also say when I book flights, I almost 100 % exclusively search for my flights on Google flights right now, just because of the way when you are looking at like pricing, you can when it's like, what days do you want to fly, you just click on the calendar, and it pulls up the calendar, and it just shows you the lowest price on every day.

3:44and like I would like I don't know what people did before that you just have to search every day and wait till it came up with a response and then decide which one was the cheapest day when I travel though I'm usually planning it like a couple months ahead or a month ahead of time and I'm just gonna I like it's not like I'm super fixed on when I'll just go to whatever the cheapest day is is when I'm gonna go travel basically right so um I always use google flights for that because they're great and so I think now that they have this flights deal thing it's gonna definitely be something that I will have to look at more closely to see what it's capable of.

4:16In their demo, sort of when they gave an example, one of their, I guess, like, you know, example questions that you could ask, which is a little bit more simple than what I was asking before, they said, help me plan a girl's trip to Phoenix with three friends, March 6 to 9. We want to. So, okay, one thing that I will say is funny about that is it's like, you didn't need to tell it that it was a girl's trip. You could say three friends, like, I don't know, there's just like certain things that like in their demo that you can add all this fluff that aren't part of it. When I'm asking it questions, I'm just like going down like a very strict list of everything I say I want to be part of the criteria to search.

4:51And sometimes I, I think overwhelm it with that. But yeah, you can, you can make natural language requests. And it can do a fairly good job of giving you an answer. And then like you mentioned, they have the whole canvas feature, which is pretty cool When you're when you're planning a trip, Jamie, like what is your workflow usually look like for something like that? Yeah, I mean, I would say typically it's pretty tricky because you got to kind of bounce back and forth. I mean, we like to use points, which adds a whole nother layer of complexity. Yeah. I don't know when or if that will ever be integrated because each, you know, depending on what car do you have or what airline you use, you have different point deals.

5:33But we try it. So we try to first maybe find a good deal on a hotel and then we book the flights and then usually have to tweak one a day or two on either side. And it takes a while to kind of make those all line up. So, yeah, it's pretty tricky. And that's why I think a tool like this could be could be super helpful. OK, I want to give you guys an example just so you guys don't know. I'm not crazy and I'm probably not overly demanding. But I said I want to go to Hawaii for the next two weeks with a family of two adults and three kids. I felt like that's pretty straightforward, basically like drop down settings.

6:07And it said, we couldn't match your search. Your search might be a bit too complex for our current capabilities, but we're always learning. So I'm going to try this exact same prompt inside of ChatGPT using their Expedia plugin and see if it's actually any better at responding. But yeah, I'll let you know what it says. What's interesting about, and I just noticed this on the Google Travel website, is they have actually a vacation rentals tab, which piques my interest because that's kind of the world I'm in and I'm trying to grow my vacation rental business. And so the fact that you can actually look up those within Google is very interesting to me.

6:49I don't know if it links to the Airbnb or Booking.com or how it actually integrates. But that is very so it looks like through Verbo and Expedia, it'll connect to Google. I don't know if maybe they have a vendetta against Airbnb. I'm not sure. But either way, that's a pretty interesting feature that I will be keeping my eye on. That is interesting. Also on chat, GBT, and perhaps I'm doing something wrong. I'm not able to I wasn't able to call on Expedia or Kayak. There probably is a way to do it. So I'll just say that publicly. but because in the last five seconds I wasn't able to figure it out it's not uh simple I tried doing like in the past I swear I've done the at symbol oh you know what maybe it's like chachapati 5.1 came out maybe it doesn't work with 5.1 I'm not sure um but I wasn't seeing like the Expedia integration in there but like there's a way to do it but it's not easy so it feels like no one has really figured this out and the reason why this kind of drives me crazy is because basically every time a new AI model comes out and they're like it can do like agentic blah blah blah, blah.

7:54The demo that literally everyone gives. It's like, if you're looking to like book a trip, like you can just chat with it and say these things and it can like, like everyone uses the book a trip demo as like their, how good their AI model is. And yet here I am struggling to get a chat GPT to search for two weeks for five people. And Google's own flight deal is struggling to do it. I'm sure there's a way to do it. Maybe people are calling me dumb, but like it, it isn't easy. So one thing that I will say with this whole episode is, I think it's a good example of a lot of times these companies will come out with an announcement or a demo, and perhaps the capabilities are there, they're hard to find.

8:31But also perhaps people oversell and overhype the capabilities of their AI models. On the show, what we always try to do is help make it as easy as possible for you guys to understand what is hype and what is not. So that is what we're attempting to do in this episode, even though I'm struggling to get the flights thing to even give me a response at all. Yeah, I don't know. I think eventually it will all work, but I think we're in the beginning stages of it right now. But for now, I think Google Flights is a pretty good tool specifically for flights. I don't know about planning on a whole vacation yet.

9:09I was even just clicking around on the vacation rental side of things, trying to see if I could pull mine up. And it had basically any link I would click on to go to it would go to like a third party site that didn't even have my property. It was like, like blue pillow pulled up, which I've never heard of, you know, so it's not actually pulling up the Airbnb link where you can book it. It's just kind of saying that, Hey, this property is in this area. Good luck finding it. That's hilarious. Okay. I will say it's not completely useless while you were talking. I did actually get it to come up with a good result for some flight deals um what i did is i had to remove the the kids off of it for some reason i think it actually this flight deals thing doesn't uh show responses if you say that there's kids um i looked at there's like filters on the bottom and you can do drop down on passengers and it only shows you adults so once i changed it to just be adults and I removed the kids from the search then it was able to find some some flights to Hawaii so I don't know pro tip if you have kids don't don't put them into the flights deal thing I'm sure you could still go book their tickets but um it's not gonna look for them doing that uh specific search so there's like a bunch of these finicky things you have to figure them out give it a try um I think it's a good tool but it does have some some tricky bits anyways thanks everyone so much for tuning into the podcast today um talking about AI and travel and giving you a real look at what the capabilities are, cutting out the hype, telling you our frustrations and what we actually see on the ground here.

10:46Hope you guys all have a fantastic rest of your week. Make sure to go check out the AI Hustle School community if you're interested in growing and scaling your business and career with AI tools. We'll catch you guys all in the next episode.