Google upgrades its Flight Deals feature within Google Flights by integrating advanced AI, making it easier to find cheap flight tickets. This update aligns with the rising demand for smarter, faster, and more intuitive travel-planning tools. Initially launched in beta in August 2025 for the US, Canada, and India, the tool now supports more than 200 countries and over 60 languages.
What makes this rollout stand out is its ability to understand natural-language requests and instantly present the best airfare bargains. Budget-conscious and flexible travelers can now describe “how, when, and where” they want to travel, and the AI surfaces the best fare bargains.
Flight Deals uses Google’s generative AI to understand natural-language descriptions of a trip, say, “week-long winter break in a food-loving city, nonstop flights only.”
It then compares real-time flight data across hundreds of airlines and booking platforms to show relevant low-cost options. Results are ranked by percentage savings first, then by absolute price, helping users prioritize better discounts.
In addition to Flight Deals, Google has enhanced its AI Mode in Search. A new feature called Canvas enables users to build travel itineraries seamlessly. Canvas draws from Google Flights, Google Maps (for photos and reviews), and the web to generate a structured travel plan based on user inputs.
Users can refine plans through follow-up prompts, such as asking the AI to trade off between staying near restaurants versus being closer to nature.
Google is also expanding its agentic booking feature within AI Mode. Currently available to US users, this lets the AI search and suggest live options for restaurants, events, and wellness appointments.
Google has said that direct flight and hotel booking via AI Mode is planned for the future, allowing users to compare schedules, amenities, prices, and reviews through a conversational interface.
This upgrade to Google Flights introduces a user-friendly way to search for budget flights; users no longer need to adjust date grids or filter settings. Simply describe the trip, and AI takes care of the rest.
The tool reveals unusual destinations and deals that regular flight-search interfaces could miss. This could greatly assist the travel planning of both regular flyers and occasional planners and reduce the time spent searching for lower airfares.
Google’s move comes amid increasing competition from travel platforms like Expedia and Booking.com, many of which are also building AI-based planning tools. There is also regulatory interest, as some antitrust scrutiny suggests that Google may be favoring its own flight-search tools.
Still, deploying a custom version of its Gemini 2.5 model to power Flight Deals shows Google’s serious bet on AI for travel discovery and planning.
Previously, Google Flights introduced a “Cheapest” tab to surface budget-friendly tickets with trade-offs like longer layovers. However, the new AI-enabled Flight Deals not only display the cheapest fares, but it also understands the user's likes and recommends vacations that the user might miss.
Compared to the older Google Flights model, this AI upgrade is a major evolution. In the constantly evolving travel-tech industry, Google’s incorporation of generative AI could redefine how people search for budget flights and plan trips, making saving on airfare more intuitive than ever before.