# Google's AI Mode Now Tracks Flight Prices and Books Your Hotel > Source: > Published: 2026-08-27 23:40:11+00:00 *Google has moved AI Mode from travel advice into hotel checkout. If you plan trips through Search, the booking fight is now happening inside the answer box.* Google said on August 27 that AI Mode in Search can now track flight prices and show points and miles rates for flights and hotels. It can also complete some hotel bookings through Google Pay. Ask it to track a fare, and it can send an email when the price changes. Simple enough. The flight tracker is the broadest of the three changes. According to Google's own announcement, AI Mode now pulls prices from more than 300 partner airlines and travel sites, then lets you set alerts from the same conversation. There is a catch in the footnote: flight price tracking is available in more than 180 countries and territories, but not in EEA countries and territories. Hotel booking is narrower, and more important. It has started rolling out in the US, in English, through the Continue on Google option. You pick a room type and check details such as the cancellation policy. Then you pay with Google Pay. Booking.com, Expedia, Hilton, Hotels.com, IHG Hotels & Resorts, Marriott International, Priceline, Trip.com, Choice Hotels International, and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts are named partners. The hotel or booking platform remains the merchant of record and handles customer service. That last detail matters. Google isn't pretending to run the hotel desk. It's taking control of the screen where you decide which hotel gets your money. [The EU just ordered Google to hand Android and Search data to its AI rivals](https://startupfortune.com/the-eu-just-ordered-google-to-hand-android-and-search-data-to-its-ai-rivals/) The European Commission ordered Google to open 11 Android features to rival AI assistants and share anonymized search data with competitors like OpenAI starting in 2027. Google's Kent Walker calls it a threat to user privacy and security. - [eu orders google share android data](https://startupfortune.com/the-eu-just-ordered-google-to-hand-android-and-search-data-to-its-ai-rivals/) - [google search data competitors 2027](https://startupfortune.com/the-eu-just-ordered-google-to-hand-android-and-search-data-to-its-ai-rivals/) Points and miles pricing is the loyalty hook. Google says the feature is globally available in supported AI Mode locations and languages, though some features won't be available to EEA users. It starts with Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines, American Airlines, Choice Hotels, Hilton, and Wyndham. Accor, Flying Blue, Hyatt, LATAM Airlines, and Lufthansa Group are next. This isn't Google's first booking push. In November 2025, Google brought agentic booking in AI Mode to restaurant reservations, event tickets, and beauty and wellness appointments in the US. Julie Farago, Google's vice president of engineering for travel and local search, told PhocusWire at the time that Google wasn't going to rush flights and hotels because people needed control through the booking flow. Now the hotel part is live. ## OpenAI already showed the risk The caution is earned. OpenAI launched Instant Checkout in ChatGPT on September 29, 2025, with US Etsy sellers live at launch and more than a million Shopify merchants promised as coming soon. By March 2026, that stand-alone checkout plan had been pulled back. TechCrunch reported that OpenAI said the first version didn't offer the flexibility it wanted, and The Information reported that only a small number of merchants were using checkout inside ChatGPT. Shoppers were willing to research products in a chatbot. They weren't rushing to finish the purchase there. Google has a cleaner starting point in travel because it already owns a big part of the comparison layer through Google Flights and Google Hotels. Its new AI Mode tools lean on partner feeds rather than asking a chatbot to make sense of loose product pages from the open web. That doesn't make the trust problem disappear. It does make the data problem less wild. Perplexity is chasing the same commerce prize from another direction. Its Instant Buy feature lets US users buy eligible products directly through Perplexity, with PayPal powering the checkout and merchants such as Wayfair and Abercrombie & Fitch among the named examples. Perplexity says eligible products also come from thousands of merchants on BigCommerce, Shopware, and Wix platforms. None of this proves that people want to hand over every booking decision to a chatbot. Not yet. [DuckDuckGo turns Google's AI search push into an opening](https://startupfortune.com/duckduckgo-turns-googles-ai-search-push-into-an-opening/) DuckDuckGo says traffic to its No AI search page more than tripled after Google's latest AI search announcements. The spike shows that AI-free search is becoming a meaningful product differentiator, even if the bigger test is whether users stay. - [how to search without AI results](https://startupfortune.com/duckduckgo-turns-googles-ai-search-push-into-an-opening/) - [DuckDuckGo No AI search page alternative to Google](https://startupfortune.com/duckduckgo-turns-googles-ai-search-push-into-an-opening/) ## The fight is over the first choice For Expedia, Marriott, Priceline, and the rest, Google's travel upgrade is useful and uncomfortable at the same time. They still get the booking. They still handle service. But the moment where you compare hotels, filter by reviews, and decide which link deserves a tap is moving into Google's own conversation window. Frankly, that's the bigger story than the fare alert. Google has spent two decades sending search traffic to travel sites and taking money from ads and referral paths along the way. AI Mode points to a different Search, one where Google answers the question and narrows the options - then keeps you there until payment. That shift won't land evenly. Airlines may like another way to push direct bookings, and hotel chains may accept it if the reservation still lands in their own systems. Online travel agencies will have to live with the trade: more surface area inside Google, less control over the customer's first click. Regulators will notice the same thing. When the company that controls search also controls more of the transaction path, the old argument about referral traffic starts to look thin. You don't need Google to own the hotel for Google to own the booking moment. **Also read:** [Researcher Alon Hertz Tricked Claude, Codex and Hermes Into Running Malware](https://startupfortune.com/researcher-alon-hertz-tricked-claude-codex-and-hermes-into-running-malware/) • [Trump Weighs Chip Tariffs Up To 100% That Could Slow The AI Buildout](https://startupfortune.com/trump-weighs-chip-tariffs-up-to-100-that-could-slow-the-ai-buildout/) • [US Startups Are Quietly Replacing OpenAI and Anthropic With Chinese AI](https://startupfortune.com/us-startups-are-quietly-replacing-openai-and-anthropic-with-chinese-ai/)