Google is moving aggressively to collapse the entire trip planning journey into its own ecosystem, rolling out AI tools that can plan itineraries, surface personalized deals and, increasingly, push users all the way through to bookings for flights, hotels, restaurants and activities without leaving Search.

The changes, many of which arrived quietly in late 2025, are reshaping how travelers discover and reserve everything from a weekend city break to a long‑haul adventure.

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AI in Search Becomes a Full Trip Concierge

For years, Google Travel has sat on top of the world’s biggest stack of search data, flight prices and hotel listings. What is changing now is how that information is packaged and acted on. With the expansion of AI Overviews in Search for U.S. users, travelers can type open‑ended prompts such as “five days in Lisbon with kids in April” and receive structured, day‑by‑day suggestions that blend flight options, places to stay and things to do in a single, synthesized result, rather than a page of blue links.

Those AI Overviews are no longer just inspiration. They can be exported directly into Google Docs or Gmail, turning rough itineraries into shareable plans, or refined in Gemini, Google’s flagship AI assistant, for deeper research. In practical terms, that means fewer hours bouncing between tabs and more of the decision‑making happening inside a Google interface, where commercial partners and paid placements are woven into the advice in more subtle ways than traditional ads.

Google’s generative engine is also designed to stay in the loop as travelers refine their plans. Users can ask follow‑up questions to tweak accommodations based on budget, neighborhood vibe or amenities, drilling down from “a beach town in Spain” to “a quiet, walkable area with apartment‑style hotels under a set nightly rate.” Each new turn keeps them locked into Google’s environment, eroding the space that online travel agencies once used to capture a booking.

Canvas and AI Mode Turn Itineraries Into Interactive Projects

The most visible symbol of this shift is Canvas, a planning workspace embedded in AI Mode in Search. Introduced as a general productivity tool earlier in 2025, Canvas gained travel‑specific powers in November: it can now pull real‑time data for flights and hotels, layer in information from Google Maps such as photos and reviews, and organize that into a living itinerary users can revisit and revise over time.

Travelers start by telling AI Mode what kind of trip they are planning and what they care about, then select a “Create Canvas” option. In response, Canvas assembles a draft plan that might include suggested flight routes and times, a shortlist of hotels that match price and location preferences, and a sequence of restaurant and activity ideas optimized for travel time around the city. Everything sits side by side in a persistent dashboard that remembers previous conversations.

Because Canvas is tied to search and Maps, it can suggest tradeoffs in a way that static booking engines rarely do. A traveler can ask whether it is better to stay near an acclaimed brunch spot or closer to a hiking trailhead, and the system will recompute the itinerary with updated walking or transit times, different lodging clusters and recalculated costs. The aim is to replace a patchwork of map pins, spreadsheets and screenshots with a single, AI‑curated storyboard.

For now, access to Canvas travel planning is limited to U.S. desktop users who have opted into AI Mode experiments, but Google has signaled that the tool is central to its long‑term vision for trip planning. As it expands, Canvas is likely to become the default way many people, particularly younger travelers, organize their vacations.

Flight Deals and Smarter Air Search Challenge OTAs

On the flights side, Google is pushing further into territory traditionally dominated by online travel agencies and meta‑search engines. Its AI‑powered Flight Deals tool, which debuted across select markets in mid‑2025, is now rolling out globally to more than 200 countries and territories and supports over 60 languages. Rather than forcing users to input fixed dates and destinations, Flight Deals invites natural language requests such as “a week‑long trip this winter to a warm, tropical destination under a set budget.”

Behind the scenes, the tool analyzes live Google Flights data and compares current fares against historical medians for similar routes over the past year. A fare qualifies as a deal only if it is meaningfully below the typical price for that type of trip, taking into account variables like season, cabin class and trip length. The result is a curated set of options that look more like personalized opportunities than a generic grid of flights sorted by price.

For travelers frustrated by the limitations of basic economy tickets, Google has added filters that can exclude those pared‑back fares on U.S. and Canadian routes, addressing a common pain point where the cheapest price comes with cramped seats, strict baggage rules and change restrictions. Those refinements, combined with AI‑driven suggestions about shifting dates or airports to unlock savings, are drawing users deeper into Google Flights and away from rival fare‑comparison platforms.

In parallel, Gemini’s travel‑focused capabilities, including customizable “Gems” that can be trained as dedicated travel assistants, are beginning to plug directly into Google Flights. That gives travelers a conversational front‑end to the same pricing engine, with an AI agent that can flag when a flight price drops, propose alternative routes or suggest entirely different destinations when it detects a better value for similar dates.

Hotels, Price Tracking and the Battle for the Booking Button

Google’s hotel search has quietly been inching toward a similar model, and recent updates push it further. Travelers browsing hotels in Search now see a price‑tracking toggle that, once activated, sends alerts if rates fall significantly for their chosen dates and area. The system factors in filters like star rating and proximity to landmarks, then looks across listed properties to flag notable drops, an approach that mirrors longstanding features in Google Flights and aims squarely at price‑sensitive travelers who might have previously relied on hotel‑specific apps or subscription deal services.

Those hotel listings are increasingly wrapped in AI‑generated summaries that highlight why a property may be a fit, blending review sentiment, neighborhood context and amenity details into a few plain‑language lines. Instead of scrolling dozens of reviews, a user might see “good for families, walkable location near museums, but smaller rooms and limited late‑night dining,” with booking buttons from multiple partners sitting just below.

Crucially, Google is preparing to extend the same “agentic” booking capabilities it has been testing on restaurants and appointments to hotels and flights. In AI Mode, U.S. users can already have the system make dinner reservations or secure event tickets through partners such as OpenTable and Ticketmaster, using their stated preferences for time, location and cuisine. Google has said that hotel and flight bookings are next in line, signaling a future where AI not only suggests a property, but navigates to a preferred booking partner and fills in the details automatically.

For hotel brands and online agencies, that raises the stakes of being featured prominently inside Google’s results. While the company presents multiple booking options, whoever owns the underlying transaction also owns the customer relationship and post‑booking upsell opportunities. As search results become more conversational and less list‑driven, concerns are mounting in the travel industry that independent sites will be pushed further down the funnel.

From “Things to Do” to Bookable Tours and Experiences

Google’s ambitions reach beyond flights and hotels into the lucrative world of tours and activities. The company has spent years building out a “Things to do” layer in Search and Maps, and its latest AI features are designed to make that layer a bridge to bookings for experiences that travelers once sourced only through local operators or specialist platforms.

Within Canvas and AI Overviews, itinerary suggestions now routinely include specific attractions and experiences, clad with Map photos, star ratings, opening hours and busy‑time forecasts. A day in Rome might arrive pre‑loaded with a timed entry to the Colosseum, a guided food tour in Trastevere and a late‑afternoon visit to the Vatican Museums, each tied back to partner booking flows where available.

Google is also extending to experiences the same agentic workflow it uses for restaurant reservations. In trials, U.S. users can ask AI Mode to “book a morning walking tour in Spanish, under a certain price, near our hotel on the second day,” and the system will search across partner inventory, check availability and attempt to lock in a time slot. The vision is to transform what was historically an in‑destination, last‑minute purchase into a pre‑trip, AI‑orchestrated choice that happens within Google’s ecosystem.

This approach threatens to further commoditize the tours and activities space, where margins are already tight and platforms fight for visibility. If Google’s AI becomes the default recommender of what to do in a city, independent operators could find themselves squeezed out unless they connect their inventory to the aggregators most deeply integrated with Google’s systems.

Much of Google’s new power in travel comes from its ability to stitch together dozens of small behaviors into a unified planning graph. Google Maps, long considered an essential companion on the ground, is now being wired into pre‑trip inspiration in ways that blur the line between browsing and booking. A new feature lets users upload or select screenshots of places they have collected from social media or blogs; powered by Gemini’s image recognition, Maps can identify the locations and automatically organize them as pins in a trip‑ready map.

Immersive View, which converts Street View and aerial imagery into 3D visualizations, has expanded to more than 50 cities and serves as a preview tool for neighborhoods in cities like Amsterdam, Las Vegas and Tokyo. Travelers can “fly” through a district to assess walkability, see where restaurants cluster or gauge how easy parking might be. That spatial context then feeds back into Canvas and AI Mode, which can recommend where to stay based not just on price and star rating, but on how the area looks and feels.

At the same time, Google is threading Gemini through its productivity suite so that pre‑trip logistics do not escape its orbit. With access to Gmail and Docs for Google One AI Premium subscribers, Gemini can scan confirmation emails, build packing lists, track loyalty accounts and even draft messages to travel companions summarizing options generated in Search. The more a traveler leans on these tools, the less likely they are to turn to independent comparison sites or booking engines.

The company is also chipping away at language barriers, expanding AI Overviews in Lens to more languages. Visual search that could once label a landmark now can explain what it is, suggest visiting hours and route travelers there, all within the same interface. That makes it easier for once‑niche destinations to be discovered and navigated by first‑time visitors, with Google quietly brokering the connection to transport, dining and activity partners.

Regulation, Rivals and What It Means for Travelers

Google’s aggressive move into end‑to‑end trip planning is occurring against a backdrop of regulatory scrutiny and intensifying competition. In Europe, antitrust authorities have spent years probing how the company presents flight and hotel search results, concerned that Google’s own services may be favored over independent rivals in ways that distort consumer choice. The expansion of AI Overviews and Canvas, which can place Google‑curated results atop the page, is likely to revive questions about whether competing platforms can receive fair visibility.

The broader travel industry is also bracing for what this consolidation means for margins and brand loyalty. Online travel agencies, which depend heavily on traffic from Google, face the risk that more of that traffic will be captured and monetized before visitors ever click through. Hotels and airlines worry that becoming just another tile inside an AI‑generated plan will make it harder to differentiate on service, loyalty perks or unique experiences.

At the same time, competitors are racing to build their own AI‑first travel tools. Established players such as Booking Holdings, Expedia Group and Trip.com have been investing in chatbots and personalized recommendation engines, while newer entrants and media brands are experimenting with AI assistants that combine journalism with booking flows. The result is a landscape where travelers may soon have a choice between several AI concierges, each steering them toward different suppliers and platforms.

For travelers themselves, the immediate effect is convenience. Planning a complex trip is becoming faster, more visual and more personalized, and the promise of AI‑filtered deals and automated bookings lowers the friction that used to make trip research a slog. The trade‑offs are less visible but significant: reliance on a single ecosystem, less transparency about which recommendations are organic versus paid, and a tightening feedback loop in which a handful of algorithms decide what constitutes the “best” way to see a destination.

As Google knits together Search, Maps, Gemini and its booking partners into what amounts to a travel operating system, the way people discover, compare and commit to trips is being rewritten. The question for the next few years will be whether regulators, rivals and travelers themselves are comfortable letting one tech giant sit at the center of almost every journey.