Google Flights

Never turn down a free second opinion. Despite all the great travel searching and booking sites available these days, Google Flight (free) is one to add to your list of flight-search sites to check before typing in your credit card number. Two show-stoppers prevent the site from being actually useful: 1) it's for round-trip, U.S. flights only and 2) you can't actually make a purchase on the site.

Google Flight's problems have nothing to do the abilities it does have, which are awesome, and everything to do with what it doesn't have: a purchasing option, international flights, multi-city and one-way options, accommodations booking, vacation package deals, add-ons (car rental, insurance, sight-seeing trips). What it can do is filter a flight search by numerous options and deliver results in a flash, faster than any other site I've seen. It's no surprise coming from a company that made its name from revolutionizing online search, but the results and the speed with which they hit the page are astounding. To book travel, we like Editors' Choice Orbitz (free, 4 stars) best, but Google Flights still can be useful for doing some preliminary air travel research.

Why Use Google Flights?
The primary reason to use Google Flights, despite lacking numerous features that we would consider basic in travel websites, is because it's fast. Wicked fast.

When you land on the page, you can start typing the name of any U.S. city, and Google Flights will suggest ones that you probably mean. Fill in both departing and arriving cities, then watch a map show you the most direct flight line between the two locations. New York to Honolulu looks a lot farther than it sounds.

Below the map, enter the dates you want to travel. You can toggle a large monthly calendar to appear below the map to adjust your dates. A yellow spanner bar covers the dates you want to travel, and you can drag them around, in real time, to look for better dates for flights.

A second visual indicator shows up to the right of the calendar, with bar graphs indicating high and low prices for various dates. If you initially look for a seven-day trip to Hawaii, the bars will find an average price?let's just say for argument's sake it's $804?and mark that in the middle of the display. A scroll bar to the side lets you slide up and down to move forward and backward on the calendar to look for lower prices for a seven-day Hawaiian getaway. Mouse over the bars to find the lowest price, which may or may not be $609 (!) if you hurry up and book this March 7 flight.

For finding the best time to fly based on price, Google Flights is awesome.

To the left of the calendar are more options, such as departing time, connections, and airlines and air alliances. Frequent travels will find the connections feature alone invaluable, as you can easily eliminate any flights that connect through New York's JFK Airport, a leading source of delays worldwide.

Another superb filter for avid travelers is the ability to not just rule out airlines that you don't want to fly, but rule in specific airline alliances, helping you maximize those frequent flier miles.

Add any filter to your search, and the results appear before you can blink. When you find a result you like, you can click to open it and see the details, like flight number and precise travel times, but you can't "pin" it or save it to a space like you can with Kayak (free, 3 stars).

Check With Google, Book On Orbitz
Orbitz (free, 4 stars) still leads the pack for travel sites, and is our Editors' Choice. If you have a lot of factors to take into consideration for your travel plans, start with Orbitz and run a quick-cross check on Google Flights, which is so fast it will only take you a moment to drill down your options and find exactly what you need. Then buy your ticket through Orbitz.

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/SQGfrcgc518/0,2817,2400968,00.asp

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