A New AI Tool Can Help You Find Affordable Vacations Customized To Your Every Whim And Fantasy

AI seems to be taking over the world, slowly replacing or transforming jobs in the fields of healthcare, marketing, finance, law, and more. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that AI is also infiltrating the travel space. Over the last few years, it has played an integral role in helping potential travelers optimize their routes, personalize trips, locate the best hotel deals, and find the information they need. AI can be helpful in organizing and executing group getaways — for example, Apple Invites is a game-changing app that will help you get your vacation out of the group chat and into reality. You can even plan the road trip of your dreams using AI. Tools like Shaka Guide, the clever app that acts a personal tour guide, boasts over 90 audio tours for exploring Hawai'i by car. But yet another advanced, AI-powered tool is dropping, and it's likely to simplify travel even further: Google Flight Deals.

The key difference between Flight Deals and similar tools like Skyscanner, Kiwi.com, Expedia, and Google Flights is its flexibility. When using other metasearch engines, you'd typically select the names of your departure and destination airports from a drop-down menu, along with your specific dates, type of ticket, and more. Obviously, this is to fine-tune the search and help the engine provide you with the most accurate results. But what if you don't exactly know what you're looking for and don't mind a surprise? Or what if you simply want to find the most affordable vacation and aren't picky about the specific dates or locations? Then Flight Deals is probably the best tool for you. Using open-ended search prompts, you'll find the best fares for your trip across a variety of dates and destinations — quickly and easily.

Islands tested this tool, with interesting and unexpected findings. Flight Deals was provided with the intentionally vague prompt, "Surprise me – one week solo trip in a city I've never been to that's safe, friendly, affordable, and fun." It automatically identified the tester's location as Portland, so the flights listed all departed from Portland International Airport (although this can, of course, be changed). The results were wide-ranging, with metropolises on several continents and dates stretching across a six-month period. They were ranked from lowest to highest price, with Austin at the top ($145) and Buenos Aires at the bottom ($1,013). The engine also did surprisingly well with the "city I've never been to" requirement, as the prompt generator had only visited two of the 30-plus options listed.

When given the following statement, "I want to go on a girls' trip for five days sometime in the spring of 2026," Flight Deals provided March departures to over 20 destinations worldwide, from Tokyo to Lisbon. The results given were reasonably affordable — all under $1,000, with San Diego being the cheapest (at $209) and Auckland being the most expensive (at $828). The search produced some obvious choices for a quick girls' getaway, like Las Vegas, Cancún, and New Orleans, and came up with some surprising picks as well, including Mexico City, Cusco, and Reykjavík. A short description of each place was given underneath ("Viking history, nightlife & Blue Lagoon" for the latter).

The tool will certainly improve over time, but these early tests are promising. While the aforementioned options may not make the list of the best destinations in the world for your next girls' trip, they might just be the location of your most memorable vacation yet — if you're willing to give them a chance.

This tool is best suited for people who don't have an exact plan for their trip yet and are open to a number of possibilities. With other travel aggregators, it's not quite as easy to compare results from multiple searches, since you would need to begin your search from scratch every time you changed dates or destinations.

But along with its comprehensiveness, one of the main draws of Flight Deals is its ability to understand natural, simple language — it's meant to be like chatting with a friend. Once on the webpage, feel free to be as specific or as vague as you'd like. You can include the month or season of your desired travel, preferred destination (city, country, continent), and type of trip (solo, couples, luxury). You can mention its purpose (ski, golf, foodie trip) or even the general vibe you're searching for (romantic, party, family-friendly). Or you can include none of these things and see what turns up!

As of this writing, Flight Deals is in the beta stage, and as the name suggests, it can only be used to search for flights. However, perhaps in future iterations, the technology will be expanded to cover accommodations, experiences, transportation, and gastronomic needs, too. It is currently being rolled out in the U.S., Canada, and India, while the team continues to test and improve the tool based on user feedback. So, if you're not in any of these countries, you'll need to wait before you can try it out for yourself. But Flight Deals will be made widely available at some point — and when it is, you can look forward to surprisingly perfect budget trips to places you may not have previously considered, which are customized to your whims and needs.