Google Enhances Travel Planning with AI-Powered Hotel Price Tracking and Trip Itinerary Features

Need to Get Away? Google's Travel Search Can Now Track Hotel Prices

After years of Google offering to monitor airfares to help you grab the cheapest price for a chair in the sky, the tech giant is now offering the same assistance to book a bed on the ground, with hotel-rate tracking launching this week. "Simply tap the price-tracking toggle below the search filters, and you'll get an email if prices go down substantially for any of the hotels listed in the results," Google says in a blog post. "Our systems will account for the filters you've selected, like star rating or beach access, as well as the specific area you're viewing on the map." That post highlights another new feature to help with trip planning. If you give Google Maps access to your photos and then start taking screenshots of travel pictures found on social media and elsewhere online, Google Maps can lean on Google's Gemini AI to discern the locations of those pics and put them on a personalized map. In a break from Google's usual practice, Android users will have to wait to try this out. "This feature starts rolling out this week in the US in English on iOS -- and is coming soon to Android." Google is also using this opportunity to remind people to use Gemini and other AI tools to plan trips. My test of "create an itinerary for Washington, D.C., with a focus on local food" yielded a three-day outline that led off with breakfast at Eastern Market on Capitol Hill, followed by a half-smoke at Ben's Chili Bowl. That is legit though unoriginal advice, but you should verify Gemini's output like any other AI chatbot. The same goes for the Gems personalized AI agents that Google now suggests using for ongoing travel planning. Separately, Google shared some search data about where Americans would most like to get away. The top five international destinations, as discerned from Google Flights searches for departures from US airports from June 1 to Aug. 31, are Curaçao, Osaka, St. Lucia, Tokyo, and Rio de Janeiro. The top five domestic destinations are San Juan; Billings, Mont.; Nantucket, Mass.; St. Louis; and Providence, R.I. If there's a pattern among those seemingly random destinations beyond a certain fondness for places on or near water, we may need to turn to Gemini or some other AI app to find it.

Here's how Google Search can help you score a sweet deal on your next hotel booking

Hotel price tracking is rolling out globally this week on mobile and desktop. Google is upgrading some of its travel and planning tools ahead of the Summer breaks. Google Search's AI Overviews feature can now plan your entire cross-country trip, while Google Maps is adding a new tool to analyze screenshots to create a travel list. The next significant upgrade is coming to Google Search, allowing it to price-track hotels, too. Once you have a base plan ready for a trip, the next step is to look for flights and hotels. Google Search and even Google Flights are great for looking up flights, tracking prices, and getting price drop alerts on them. Now, Google Search can also give you price drop alerts for hotels for your chosen dates and destination. To price-track hotels, tap the price-tracking toggle below the search filters. You will receive an alert email if prices go down substantially for any of the hotels listed in the results. Google will account for filters like star rating and beach access, as well as the specific area of the map that you are viewing, so you, hopefully, won't be inundated with irrelevant alerts. Hotel price tracking is launching globally this week on mobile and desktop browsers on google.com/hotels.