As far as I can remember, GF could never be relied upon to include every possible route from origin to destination. As you feed the search engine more detail, the price would often jump. Some modes of transport may not be known to GF at all.

Is it just me or does GF now show these giant labels with photos for destinations in "explore" mode? For several weeks I was able to get rid of them by reloading (Google probably did AB testing), but now they seem persistent. Obscure the screen and make reading actual fares difficult.

I'm coming up against the 100 flights tracking limit frequently.

Anyone else?

Yep it's showing the giant dumb pictures but for now you can still get back to the old screen if you do the following:
Click on the Flights tab.
Without entering a destination, click on the Search button.
It should take you to the explore page without showing the pictures.

Thanks for this great tip, and welcome to FT!

Never mind, it does work - thanks!

Yep! Thanks I'm glad to be here :)

Yep! And continue to mention any changes you may notice in Google Flights when you come across them. I try to stay on top of what they're up to! ;)

URL format deprecated
 

The google flights url format containing this format is now fully deprecated. #flt=ATL.HBE.2021-11-01*HBE.ATL.2021-11-08;b:1;c:USD;e:1;sd:1;t:f

I'm dreaming up future excursions on Google Flights. I like using Google Flights but it hit me that something's missing. So I live in a suburb just north of Baltimore. If I'm plugging in a destination far away like AKL or TYO, I set my departure airports as BWI/IAD/PHL. But I'm not allowed to say that BWI is preferred. And when it tells me the best flights, it doesn't take into account that, you know, 8 a.m. flight out of Philly, you might need a hotel room or something. Or maybe factor in the drive time into the travel time, that sort of thing.

Anybody else not getting email alerts from GF? I've tried it a few times, but at some point it stopped emailing me when prices drop. I know they drop because when I go back to my tracked flights page I can see the price drop in the history, happening after I set up the alert. But the email is nowhere to be found (and yes, I looked in my spam folder).

I never found those emails to be helpful for ticket buyers. For example, there was a UA route I monitored, and the airline routinely dropped prices for ~4 hrs. The emails of a price drop would arrive long after the fare returned to the original level, to make it seem like the bottom was reached and it's time to buy. If you're interested in a fare, monitored it yourself. The emails are a tool for the airlines.

This is kinda weird:

1. Starting from a fresh search at https://www.google.com/flights
2. Enter cities
3. Change the dates
4. On the search results screen, click the Airlines dropdown -- I am no longer able to filter by individual airlines :mad: it only shows alliances (similar to the map search). However once I click on an alliance, then the checkboxes for the individual airlines appear for selection/exclusion.

So it's still possible, but now has an extra annoying step.

At first I thought it was another creeping removal of useful functionality, but then I noticed a subtle difference -- if I repeat the process but skip over step 3 and just accept the default dates, then the individual airline checkboxes appear from the get-go.

Perhaps the site uses IA and changes programming based on user responses. I recall your step 4 was as you described forever, but without much consistency on when individual airlines become selectable. In some cases excluded airlines were even forced back into search results without my input.

I've noticed this happens (airline filter gets reset) when switching from round trip to multi-city. The filter is still applied when you select the first leg, but the next screen to select your 2nd flight searches all airlines again.

Google Flights: Create Search URL
 

Some time ago Google Flights changed their URL. Before it was possible to search flights directly by entering a specific URL. Unfortunately now there is an encoded URL. As far as I've seen this URL is encoded in base64 (see: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/...ts-search-urls).

I'm interested in doing Google Flight search via my own form (made in Google Spreadsheets) and then getting to the Google Flight search result by clicking on a hyperlink that I created on the google spreadsheet. I used to do this before Google encoded the URLs. Does somebody know how to encode via Google Spreadsheet and how to implement this?

I guess this question might be also interesting for the developpers who maintain ITA-Matrix-PowerTools. The Google Flight hyperlink there doesn't work since Google introduced encoded URL.