Award searching just showed up in the most used search box on earth. Google just added three travel features to AI Mode, its conversational search tab, and two of them are already live. You can ask it to track a fare and get email alerts, and you can ask what a flight or hotel costs in a specific loyalty program and get a number back.
The third feature, booking a hotel inside the chat and paying through Google Pay, is rolling out in the United States only for now.
I spent some time playing around with it. Below is what worked, what didn’t, and what it could mean for award travellers.
What’s New in AI Mode
Google announced the three features on August 27, 2026. Flight price tracking is live in more than 180 countries and territories, which covers every market where AI Mode is offered except the European Economic Area, and points and miles rates have the same footprint.
| Feature | What it does | Available now? |
|---|---|---|
| Flight price tracking | Describe a trip, ask AI Mode to track it, and get email alerts when the fare moves | Yes |
| Points and miles rates | Ask what a flight or hotel costs in a partner program and see the rate in the chat | Yes, for the partners that answer |
| Hotel booking | Pick a hotel in the chat and complete the reservation through Google Pay | No, United States only in English for now |
The partner list is where the story gets interesting. At launch, award rates come from Atmos Rewards, American Airlines AAdvantage, Choice Privileges, Hilton Honors, and Wyndham Rewards. Google says ALL Accor, Air France KLM Flying Blue, World of Hyatt, LATAM Pass, and Lufthansa Miles & More are coming soon.
Aeroplan, Air Canada, and WestJet aren’t on either list. Neither are Delta SkyMiles or United MileagePlus, and Marriott Bonvoy and IHG One Rewards appear only as hotel booking partners, not as programs whose award rates you can ask about.
How Award Pricing Works with American Airlines
I started with the program Google itself used in its announcement. I asked for a nonstop from Toronto to Miami on October 16 using AAdvantage miles, and AI Mode came back with a flight card in the chat rather than a link to go find out for myself.
The 6am flight (AA 2589) came up at 23,500 miles plus $88 (CAD), priced in Canadian dollars without my asking. Clicking through produced a “Book with American” link that dropped me onto aa.com’s award search with the date filled in, which is where Google’s involvement ends. Flights are booked on the airline’s own site, and only hotels get the in-chat checkout.
The number itself was accurate. American’s own site showed the same flight at 23.5K miles plus $87.28 (CAD) in Main Cabin, so the figure Google pulled from its partner feed matched to the dollar.
What aa.com also showed is what the chat left out. The same flight has business class at 61,500 miles, which AI Mode never mentioned even though I hadn’t specified a cabin. The date strip also shows lower prices on the surrounding days, although those are for connecting itineraries rather than the nonstop, so the comparison isn’t as dramatic as it looks.
The nonstop filter I’d asked for didn’t survive the handoff either, so aa.com opened with 40 results including one-stop itineraries through Charlotte.
That leaves the bigger miss, and it’s the one Google is best placed to fix. A quick Google Flights search put the cheapest cash fare on the same 6am flight at $362 (CAD), which may be a Basic Economy fare against the Main Cabin award, but even on that comparison the award is worth roughly 1.2 cents (CAD) per mile, a weak use of AAdvantage miles. Google has both numbers in its own systems and shows you one at a time.
What Happens When You Ask About Aeroplan
The question most of our readers would ask first is the one that came up short. I asked for the same Toronto to Miami trip using Aeroplan points, and AI Mode didn’t refuse or explain that Aeroplan isn’t a partner.
Instead it steered me to Air Canada, noting that “because you are redeeming Aeroplan points, Air Canada is your primary choice,” and then priced the flights in cash at $710 (CAD) round trip. There wasn’t a points figure anywhere on the page.
The substitution is easy to miss if you’re skimming. The tool understood the question, didn’t price it, and answered a different one in the same format it used for American.
Where Atmos Rewards Fell Short
Atmos Rewards is on Google’s day-one list, and I couldn’t get a single award price out of it. Boston to Frankfurt in business class produced a text summary about Condor citing a YouTube video for “55,000 to 70,000 points.” Vancouver to Seattle, on Alaska’s own aircraft, produced paragraphs about aircraft types and competing alliances with no numbers at all.
How Hotel Award Rates and Booking Work
Asked for Hilton hotels in Chicago for one night on October 15 with their cost in Hilton Honors points, AI Mode returned a map and a proper table. The Hilton Garden Inn Chicago Downtown/Magnificent Mile came in at 60,000 points, with the Hilton Chicago and the Hilton Chicago/Magnificent Mile Suites at 70,000 each.
I checked Hilton’s site for the same night and both 70,000-point rates were correct, so again the partner feed held up where it existed.
Then I asked it to help me book the first one. The “Continue on Google” checkout didn’t appear, which I expected since it’s US-only for now, but I also didn’t get handed to Hilton’s award booking page. AI Mode pivoted to cash, suggested that “if you prefer to preserve your points, cash rates for this night start around $280,” and listed the official site at $357 alongside online travel agencies starting at $280, with no currency label on any of them.
It also assumed two guests without asking. So the points pricing stops at the table, and the booking step defaults to cash.
Coverage is another matter. One night at the Conrad Bangkok came back as a web summary quoting other blogs for “40,000 to 45,000 points,” while the same question about Chicago worked perfectly. In my testing, exact Hilton pricing only came through for a hotel in the United States, so this looks limited to US properties for the time being.
How Flight Price Tracking Works
Fare tracking has lived inside Google Flights for years, and this is the same tool with a chat window in front of it. I asked for economy flights from Toronto to Lisbon on November 5, got a comparison card led by Air Transat’s nonstop at $400 (CAD) with Air Canada at $1,143 (CAD), and typed “track the nonstop flights for me.”
It read back the route, date, and nonstop filter, asked me to confirm, and created the tracker, which then showed up in my Google Flights saved trips with email notifications on. Unlike the American handoff, the filter carried through.
If you already use the tracking tools in our Google Flights guide, nothing here is new beyond the way you ask for it. One small sign of how new all of this is came in the confirmation message, where the “price tracker” link pointed to camelcamelcamel.com, which tracks prices on Amazon.
What This Means for Award Travellers
The speed of this is worth pausing on. Little more than a year ago, Google Flights was a search form. Flight Deals arrived in August 2025, AI Mode reached Canada the same month, trip planning in Canvas followed in November, and now award pricing and hotel checkout are in the chat.
For most of the time I’ve been doing this, knowing what a flight costs in miles was earned knowledge. You had to know which program to check, which website to check it on, and which credit card points could get you there. Now that answer, at least for a handful of programs, is a sentence typed into Google.
Google says the award rates come directly from its partners, so a program has to be on the list before AI Mode can price it. Ten programs are named so far, five live and five on the way, and Aeroplan, Air Canada, and WestJet aren’t among them.
Google isn’t the only one moving this way. Hyatt’s own website takes plain-language searches, so I typed “hotels in Mexico City with a tennis court and under 25,000 points per night” and got two results, led by the Hyatt Regency Mexico City at 12,000 points per night with the $409 (CAD) cash rate shown right beside it. That side-by-side view of points and cash is something AI Mode still doesn’t offer.
Back in 2023, Star Alliance carriers went after third-party award search sites that scraped their inventory, with the volume of automated searches part of the complaint. Google’s setup inverts that problem. The airline sends the data, and Google’s own wording, “based on the latest data directly from our partners,” stops short of promising a live query for every result.
The demand side is the part I’d watch. Anyone with a Google account can now ask for award prices in plain English, and how the airlines respond to searches coming from that much larger audience is the open question.
Is this good or bad for award travellers? Honestly, both. It’s good for the hobby that someone who has never installed a browser extension can now see that a Toronto to Miami flight costs 23,500 miles, and more people redeeming points well is the whole point of what we do here.
It also means more people chasing the same saver seats, and the edge that came from simply knowing where to look gets smaller.
The reassuring part, for now, is what AI Mode can’t see. It answers for one program on fixed dates, without the cash fare beside the award and without transfer bonuses, and in my testing it never returned a partner award, which is where most sweet spots live.
Points Path puts award prices next to cash fares inside Google Flights itself, Roame and Seats.aero search across programs and flexible dates, and the manual methods in our guide to difficult award searches still find seats none of these tools surface. The advantage is shifting from knowing prices to knowing routes, partners, and timing.
The useful launch partners are narrow but real. AAdvantage is the one worth trying today, with the 15% transfer bonus from RBC Avion running until September 3, 2026. Flying Blue, which American Express Membership Rewards feeds at 1:1, is on the coming-soon list, and its new Light, Standard, and Flex award fares will test whether the chat can show a fare structure rather than a single number.
Conclusion
Personally, my habits don’t change yet. I know the routes and the approximate award pricing well enough that I’ll keep searching directly on the airline websites, since a tool showing one flight in one cabin on one date is quoting a price rather than searching for one.
What I’m looking forward to is the hotel side catching up, starting with hotel price tracking and a calendar view of cash rates, which Hilton and Marriott already offer and Hyatt still doesn’t. If you hold AAdvantage or Hilton points, it’s worth a try as a quick check. If you hold Aeroplan points, the confident answer you get back is a cash fare, not an award price.
Air Canada and WestJet aren’t named anywhere in this launch, so for now the programs most of our readers use still have to be searched the old way. Google hasn’t built a better award search. It has built a much bigger front door to the ones the airlines are willing to open up.
This story originally appeared on princeoftravel
