Google to stop booking feature for General & last minute flights – Here’s why

Google will soon prohibit the option to purchase air travel directly through the search engine since it has been shown that travelers prefer to book last minute flights directly through an airline or another travel website.

After September 30, much of the globe will lose the ability to book a flight straight through Google. The search engine will subsequently discontinue the option in the United States after March 31, 2023, according to a business representative.

“We aim to phase off the Book on Google option for flights over the next year,” a business spokesman informed T+L. “We originally offered this capability to make it easier for customers to buy tickets and to help our partner airlines and OTAs [online travel agencies] get more reservations.”

However, we’ve seen through time that customers prefer to book directly on partner websites, and we constantly aim to fulfill user preferences wherever feasible.”

• Google is discontinuing its booking service for travelers

Google said that it will discontinue booking on Google for flights for customers searching for cheap international flight tickets outside the United States by the end of September, and informed Skift that the function will be discontinued in the United States sometime after March 31.

As it turns out, fewer customers were purchasing their tickets through Google, indicating that passengers preferred to book their flights through online travel agents or directly with airlines.

• Google will continue to provide travelers with the ability to search for flight options

Even when the purchasing function is removed, passengers may still search for flights using Google Flights, which includes money-saving tools such as the ability to “explore” the map for the cheapest bargain and set price alerts on flights.

To be clear, Google Tickets is not going away; rather, it will continue to allow passengers to buy last minute flights by clicking on airline and online travel agency links, as it has done for the vast majority of flights for years. What has changed is that Google will no longer collect a small commission on reservations made through Google channels, instead connecting all clients to partners for bookings.

Google introduced the ‘Book on Google’ option in 2015 as a method to make bookings easier for airlines and online travel firms at a time when many mobile websites were not especially sophisticated. However, as the facilities have improved, they have seen a decline in the percentage of flight reservations for cheap international flight tickets originating via the ‘Book on Google’ option. As a result, the business has chosen to disable the flight booking option on Google.

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