Google Experiments With New Flight Explorer Feature

Google is trying out a new travel search tool that seems to be aimed primarily at casual travelers that are as concerned about price as they are about a destination.

It’s called Flight Explorer and it doesn’t appear to be reachable yet via Google’s regular flight search tool at google.com/flights. As best I can tell, The Next Web was first to report on the new feature this afternoon.

It looks like the most fully realized implementation of the vast data that Google has access to via its ITA Software purchase two years ago. Flight Explorer auto-detects your location and presents several destinations with a price chart showing the range of airfares available over the next two months. Mousing over the chart shows the low airfares/airlines for each date. Clicking takes you to the regular Google Flights service for a full list of airfares.

A Google spokesperson gave us this statement, confirming that Flight Explorer is just a test for now.

Flight Explorer is a an experimental feature of Flight search that allow users to explore flight destinations. The feature enables users to consider multiple destinations and multiple days at once, all using live prices, quickly.

Google’s tool is reminiscent of Kayak Explore, which also offers airfare information to multiple destinations in a single interface — one that’s much more visual than what Google is currently testing.