Google continues to beef up their plans to take over the travel industry

Last week, Google announced some new features to their Google Flights search engine to help travelers by predicting flight delays before they happen. Then on Tuesday, Google announced a few more ...

Last week, Google announced some new features to their Google Flights search engine to help travelers by predicting flight delays before they happen.

Google continues to beef up their plans to take over the travel industry

Then on Tuesday, Google announced a few more changes to their existing travel tools that further refine their niche and push them toward the top of the online travel planning food chain. 

All about that “on-the-go” mobile user experience

Google Flights is now introducing a navigation bar at the top of Google’s interface on mobile phones that allows users to bounce between flights and hotels, even activities for the date and destination they’ve selected.

It also collects upcoming and past travel reservations from the user’s Gmail with new “Explore” and “My Trips” tabs.

These moves solidify the Google extension’s big-picture strategy to get away from the middleman philosophy of other metasearch sites like Kayak or TripAdvisor, which ship you to a third party once they’re done traumatizing you with a million pop-up windows.

All about that data

Over the past few years, Google has quietly fine-tuned its travel biz, applying its machine learning tech, plus a treasure trove of user data, to provide an alternative to notoriously faulty systems like flight delay notifications.

Because there’s nothing worse than getting to the airport early and eating all your plane snacks before takeoff.

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