After months of testing, Google Flights is officially adding a permanent feature to filter out pesky basic economy fares from travelers' searches. Plus, the web giant is rolling out a new, AI-powered search tool that could be a game changer to help millions of travelers find the best flight deals.
Countless travelers (including yours truly) had been practically begging Google for years to give us a way to filter out basic economy fares. That feature quietly cropped up earlier this spring, but not for every user – and the web giant declined to confirm whether it would become a fixture.
That day has come. Google announced Thursday that basic economy filters would expand across its platform in the coming weeks for flights within the U.S. as well as Canada. Once live, travelers can easily exclude basic fares from their search results – or keep them if they're happy to forego a few perks for a cheaper price.
That change cements Google Flights as the #1 platform to search for and find flight deals. But as the rest of the travel world rapidly embraces AI, Google is also testing out a new super-search function that could help travelers easily pinpoint the cheapest fares.
A Look at AI-Based ‘Flight Deals'
Google Flights is entering the AI era, using the power of AI to help travelers book their next trips.
On top of that buzzy basic economy announcement, Google also unveiled “Flight Deals”: an AI-based search tool that lets you type in trip thoughts or ideas into a search bar so that Google can recommend new trip ideas for you. It's still in beta testing, so not every user will see it just yet. But we got an early look and found the tool should be helpful for many travelers … with a few questionable results, too.
Google billed this new Flight Deals feature as perfect for cost-sensitive, flexible travelers, who can travel on different dates or to different destinations. Most importantly, Google says you can talk to it “like a friend” and still get good answers. So instead of running a Google Flights search on your own, you can ask it, “I'm looking for a long weekend beach vacation in January 2026.”
Ultimately, this tool appears to use much of the same functionality of Google Flights Explore – which allows you to look for the cheapest flights on a map of the world from your home airport. For Flight Deals, you still have to put in a departure city, but then you can ask it to put a trip together for you conversationally instead of searching through Google Flights.
We put it to the test and found that it worked fairly well, with a few inhuman glitches.
I (selfishly) asked it the find me a long weekend ski trip this February, for instance.
What comes back is a series of trip ideas – rather than specific flights – that you can peruse on your own. It includes the cost of the cheapest flights and how much cost savings you might be looking at on flights.
As you can see, this list is (mostly) good. There were 12 total options, some of which were hardly “ski destinations” (looking at you Hartford, Connecticut…), but they all featured a percentage of savings and some pricing.
Once you click on one of those city cards, it takes you right into Google Flights' normal booking flow – showing you the cheapest options in green for your next trip.
Like most AI tools, you can continue to refine. I added a request to search for “nonstop only” and “Delta flights” which pared the results down to about four weekend trips. You can get even more granular and ask for destinations with good food scenes, and even with a specific hotel brand. Sometimes, the tool will admittedly give up. After asking for all of the things above, and then adding “with a Hyatt hotel option”, the tool spit out some results, but with a disclaimer: “We may not have been able to match every detail of your search…”
Basic Economy Filters are Here to Stay
Perhaps more importantly, the tech behemoth is also making the basic economy filter it started testing last spring available to everyone.
We've lost track of how many readers and travelers have griped about the lack of a basic economy filter … heck, we've been personally wishing for it ourselves for years. It's one of the few knocks against an otherwise unbeatable platform for finding the cheap flights you actually want to book.
Some travelers will happily sacrifice some perks in order to save some money on basic economy, but others avoid these fares like the plague. And nothing's worse than seeing a low price at first only to click through and see that the main cabin economy fare you really want will actually cost you another $80, $100, or even $250 roundtrip.
The extra costs of basic economy add up fast and this new filter should help travelers avoid seeing those restrictive fares altogether.
Bottom Line
Google just launched “Flight Deals,” an AI-powered trip planning tool that lets travelers search conversationally for flexible, budget-friendly getaways – though early tests show it’s not without quirks. At the same time, the company is rolling out its long-awaited basic economy filter to all users, helping travelers avoid restrictive fares and surprise costs when booking flights.
