Google Widens AI Flight Deals, Revamps Search Globally

Google is making a bigger travel push with its Flight Deals tool and other Search features. Flight Deals is now live in more than 200 countries and territories and available across dozens of languages, the company says, while its AI Mode will receive a new Canvas planning workspace and expanded “agentic” booking features for U.S. users.

AI Flight Deals expands worldwide across 200+ countries and languages

Flight Deals resides within Google Flights and employs generative AI techniques to parse open-ended requests and respond with budget-friendly options quickly. Instead of toggling filters manually, travelers can type out things like “long weekend in March from Toronto to a warm beach under $400” or “two-week trip to Japan in the fall with one carry-on, flexible by three days” and receive a ranked set of price-forward recommendations that include dates, airlines, and fare classes.

The expansion means availability is stretched beyond the launch markets into regions that include the U.K., France, Germany, Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, Japan, and Korea. For many users, the attraction is its speed and flexibility: The system can take a stab at balancing budget, timing, and routing preferences in one shot, then hone those results with follow-up questions like “nonstops only” or “arrive by noon.”

This is an extension of the price graph, date grid, and historical trends available in Google Flights, but it replaces manual sliders with an automatic breeze via conversations. It’s hoping to condense what commonly takes multiple tabs and tools into a single, AI-guided query.

Canvas trip planning in AI Mode brings structured itineraries

Google is introducing structured trip building to AI Mode with a new Canvas tool. On desktop in the U.S. (if these users opt into the Labs experiment), you can request a travel plan — “Family-Friendly Paris in June near parks and bakeries, mid-range hotel, two museum days” — and select Create with Canvas.

Canvas also pieces together a living itinerary in an adjacent panel, combining real-time Search data for flights and hotels with Google Maps details like photos and reviews as well as other information it may scrape from the open web. It can present trade-offs — comparing hotels based on price and amenities, or recommending restaurants and activities prioritized both for proximity to your stay as well as travel time from it — so you can negotiate choices with everyday language, like “closer to brunch but okay being farther from trailheads.”

For the frequent traveler, it’s about continuity. Plans are saved across sessions, so you can come back and tweak dates, switch out neighborhoods, or add a day trip without starting your search over.

Agentic booking expands in the U.S., broadening AI reservations

Google says that its AI Mode’s “agentic” booking feature, which was only accessible to Labs participants before, is now available nationwide to all U.S. users. These capabilities take multi-turn tasks like booking dinner reservations or tickets to an event, conditional on party size, time window, and cuisine/location: The assistant searches across various reservation systems for real-time availability and sends you a list of curated options.

In the future, Google will be making it possible to finalize flight and hotel bookings straight from AI Mode. It describes a user flow where people can compare itineraries or rooms, see schedules, photos, amenities, and reviews — and after all that, concludes with checkout — all without ever leaving the conversation. If done cleanly, that could bundle discovery, evaluation, and purchase into a single continuous interface.

Why this move matters for travelers and the travel industry

For travelers: less clicking, more context. Discovery based on price is inherently piecemeal: folks are bouncing from airlines to online travel agencies to metasearch sites and social scores. Combining generative AI with Google’s travel data and Maps content, Flight Deals and Canvas reduce friction at the top of the funnel — where most decisions get made.

For the industry, it heightens the stakes in the AI assistant race. Booking Holdings has introduced an AI Trip Planner and conversational features throughout its brands, while Expedia Group has been testing generative trip assistance. When assistants get “agentic,” or capable of taking actions on the user’s behalf, the battle switches from who has the biggest inventory to who can orchestrate the smoothest end-to-end journey within a single interface.

Consumer research from companies including Phocuswright has suggested that today the majority of leisure travel in the U.S. is researched and booked online, helping to explain why any uplift on search-to-purchase conversion would be commercially meaningful.

The hurdle will be trust: Travelers need transparency about fare rules, refund policies, room types, and fees — the sorts of details that can get lost in translation if systems aren’t carefully constructed.

What to watch next as Google rolls out AI travel features

Three questions are likely to drive its influence.

1. Accuracy and coverage: Is Flight Deals consistently bringing the actual best fares on low-cost carriers and regional airlines, or does it miss the mark — especially with edge cases like mixed-cabin itineraries or tight connections?
2. Control: Can power users still drill down into certain fare families, layover airports, and alliance preferences without breaking the conversation?
3. Bookings: How much easier is direct flight and hotel checkout in AI Mode for workflow across providers and loyalty programs?

For now, the worldwide rollout of Flight Deals and a new planning functionality kick Google further down into the trip life cycle — from inspiration at the earliest stage to the ultimate transaction. If adoption is high, one can anticipate rivals increasing the pace of their own AI assistant developments and more travelers conducting a greater percentage of their journey time during a single conversational search experience.