As of this week, a major update has come to the world’s biggest search engine, Google. What many travelers have been hoping would happen for years is finally here. Google Flights now allows users to see Southwest flights through their search engine. That means that when you search for flights on a route that Southwest operates, the airline will be among the results. This could drastically speed up your search for low-cost flights, particularly to obscure locations. One of the main things that Southwest is known for is flying to smaller airports compared to what some of its main competitors do.
One of the questions that quickly came up was whether Google would be showing accurate prices for Southwest flights. The company shared the answer in a press release, saying that any flights from the carrier that show up on the search engine will feature a link back to the official Southwest site. Users can sort out any discrepancies in the prices once they check out and purchase tickets from the airline. At this point, buying tickets directly from the company site is still the only way to book flights with Southwest online.
Google Flights will be the only other site besides Southwest.com that will feature prices for flights on this airline. That means that no other travel search engines like Expedia, Trivago, or any of the other popular sites will feature these prices. This change could really affect some of these external sites’ grip on the domestic travel market. Google will still feature links to these sites for people who want to book hotels and even flights. If they happen to offer a better rate, then users may decide to complete their booking process through them. Yet, they still won’t have access to anything Southwest-related.
This new partnership with Google may not be here to stay. Southwest is calling the experiment a “pilot program.” There’s no guarantee that the company will continue to allow the search engine to feature its flights beyond this summer. Regardless, as things stand, this gives consumers a great opportunity particularly to compare low-cost routes for domestic travel. One of the areas where this change may really help Southwest will be in its international division. The airline started out only flying domestic routes, but now it lands in 11 different countries.
Many of these international routes likely fall between the cracks because people who are not aware that Southwest flies that route don’t necessarily have the sense to check on the site. Currently, the airline flies to virtually all of the popular beach destinations in Mexico. Including Los Cabos and Cancun. It features flights to two different airports in Costa Rica. Anyone looking to fly to the Caribbean could also benefit from using this airline. It’s just a matter of finding the US airport that it departs from to reach one of these popular tourism spots. Now, with Google on the scene, the process of looking for a low-cost flight is bound to be much smoother.
