With Google Hotels, Google now also has a search engine for hotels. It doesn’t differ much from Trivago, Hotels Combined… (yet), as Google Flights does for flight search engines. Nevertheless, Google does offer one feature that no other site has!
Table of contents
Finding the Cheapest Dates
For a specific hotel (sadly not for a group of hotels or an entire city), you can let the site show you the cheapest price for all dates. Here’s an example with the famous Marina Bay Sands with the Infinity Pool on its roof in Singapore:
That way you can check the hotel’s prices without selecting specific dates, which is useful for planning your trip based on the hotel prices. This feature is also useful to find cheap nights in very high-priced or special hotels.
Sadly, the cheapest dates are not marked in green, as is the case in Google Flights. This is something that Google could improve.
This calendar is technically possible for Google because Google has access to the booking platforms’ and hotels’ prices. This does, however, mean that the shown prices aren’t necessarily bookable. Also, discounts for longer stays, or similar promotions, aren’t displayed. One should use the calendar as a rough orientation and not be surprised or angry if the price then happens to be unavailable.
To get the calendar, you have to select a specific hotel. You can either search a city in Google Hotels (with specific dates) and then click on one of the hotels, or you simply google the Hotel’s name (e.g. Marina Bay Sands). You’ll often already be shown a price overview. Click on View prices and you’ll be shown the calendar:
Conclusion
The wish to be able to search for the cheapest price for a hotel without selecting specific dates had only been a dream for a long time. Google has made it possible! Why other hotel platforms and search engines haven’t already developed this for a long time is puzzling, especially as they are now giving Google the necessary data for the implementation.
Did you find other useful features on Google Hotels? Feel free to comment!