Google Search Can Now Price Award Flights - But Not In Avios

Google has put award pricing into the main search box. In a blog post published on 27 August 2026, Google confirmed that AI Mode in Search can now show the cost of flights and hotels in points or miles, alongside two other travel changes: flight price tracking, and hotel booking without ever leaving Google.

For anyone who has lost a Sunday evening flicking between six airline websites trying to work out whether a redemption is any good, that headline sounds enormous. Having read the announcement properly, I am more measured about it. This is an important first step, and it is also close to useless for a UK Avios collector on day one. Both of those things are true at the same time.

Here is what actually launched, whether it works from the UK, and what I think it means.

Google Flights has offered price tracking for years. What is new is that you can set it up while you are still describing your trip, rather than breaking off to go and build a search. Google says you can describe where and when you want to fly and get options with the latest prices from more than 300 partner airlines and travel sites, then ask something along the lines of "track these flight prices for me" and receive an email if the price moves.

Google states this is now available in more than 180 countries and territories.

This is the bit that matters to us. AI Mode can now return the cost of flights and hotels in points or miles rather than cash. Google's own worked example is a request to fly Atlanta to Miami using American Airlines miles, with fixed outbound and return dates, and the answer comes back as the number of miles required.

Google says the numbers come from the latest data supplied directly by its partners. Once you pick something, you follow a link to the partner site and complete the redemption there. Google is not booking your award ticket.

Google describes this capability as globally available.

The third change is full hotel booking inside AI Mode, complete with room selection, cancellation policy review and payment through Google Pay. Google is clear that the hotel or booking platform remains the merchant of record and handles customer service, which is an important detail if anything goes wrong.

This one has started rolling out in the United States in English only, so it is not something UK readers can use today.

This is where the enthusiasm needs tempering. Here are the two lists, exactly as Google published them.

Read those two columns again and notice what is not there.

There is not a single Avios programme on either list. No British Airways Club, no Iberia Plus, no AerClub, no Qatar Airways Privilege Club. There is no Virgin Atlantic Flying Club either. On the hotel side, neither Marriott Bonvoy nor IHG One Rewards appears.

That last one is worth being precise about, because it is easy to misread. Marriott and IHG are named among the hotel booking partners for the third feature. Being a booking partner is not the same as exposing award pricing. One lets Google take a cash reservation for you. The other lets Google tell you what a room costs in points. Only the second is interesting to us, and Marriott and IHG are not on that list yet.

Mostly, yes, and this is one of the rare occasions where leaving the EU works in our favour.

AI Mode itself has been live in the UK since 28 July 2025, when Britain became the third country to get it after the United States and India. Google's footnotes on this week's announcement carve out the European Economic Area for both flight price tracking and parts of the points and miles experience. The UK is not an EEA member, so those carve-outs do not describe us.

In practice that means UK readers should be able to use flight price tracking and points and miles pricing, while readers in Ireland, France, Germany, Spain and the rest of the EEA will find at least some of it missing. Hotel booking is United States only for everybody else for now.

If you want to try it, the one launch partner that is properly relevant to a UK audience is Hilton. Hilton Honors Gold is one of the more useful perks sitting inside a British Amex wallet, and it comes as standard with the Business Platinum card. If you do not already hold it, you can compare the American Express UK business cards here - that is my referral link, and it is the card I use for exactly this reason.

It answers one programme at a time. Google's example query names a single currency and fixed dates. That is a lookup, not a comparison. The genuinely hard part of award search is working out which of your seven currencies books a given seat most cheaply, and asking about American Airlines miles does not answer that question. Anyone who has ever discovered that a Qatar Airways seat is cheaper booked through Avios than through Qatar's own chart knows what I mean.

It is partner-supplied data, not necessarily a live seat check. Google's phrasing is careful. Award seats disappear between the search and the booking screen constantly, and nothing in the announcement promises that every result you see has been queried against the airline's inventory at that exact moment. Treat it as a starting point and confirm on the airline site before you get attached to an itinerary.

It hands you off to book. No award ticketing happens inside Google. You still finish on the airline or hotel website, with all the usual joys that entails.

The feature is not the interesting part. The distribution is.

Award search has always lived behind something: a Chrome extension, a subscription, a forum thread, a newsletter like this one. Putting award pricing into the default search box of the mainstream internet changes who finds out that this hobby exists. That is broadly good for the hobby and mildly irritating for those of us already in it, because award seats are finite and more people are about to start looking at them.

The second thing I keep coming back to is who controls the data. Airlines have historically been hostile towards third parties scraping award availability, and we have watched tools get shut out before. A Google partnership is a different arrangement entirely: the airline supplies the feed, so the airline decides what appears. That makes the whole thing durable in a way an unofficial scraper never is.

It also makes it a marketing channel. My expectation is that the redemptions Google surfaces will lean towards the ones the airline is comfortable selling you, rather than the awkward partner sweet spots that make this hobby worth the effort. I would love to be proved wrong on that.

Two names on the "coming soon" list did make me sit up. Flying Blue and Lufthansa Group both hold real relevance for UK readers, largely because both programmes are generous with status matches. I hold Flying Blue Platinum and Miles & More Platinum myself, both obtained that way, so those are the first two I will be testing the moment they appear.

None of this changes my workflow this week. If you are hunting Avios or Virgin Points, Google cannot help you at all yet. Here is what actually works:

Once you have found the seat, Flight Seatmap will show you the cabin layout and live seat availability before you commit, and Flight Queue will tell you how long the security queue is likely to be on the day.

Google has built the front door to award search for the general public, and it has done it properly: real partner data, a natural way to ask, and a global rollout that includes the UK. That is a bigger deal than the modest launch list makes it look.

But the launch list is what it is. Until an Avios programme joins - and there is no announcement suggesting one will - this is a feature UK points collectors can admire from a distance rather than actually use. Hilton is the single exception worth trying this week.

I will report back the moment Flying Blue appears, and I will be watching the IAG Loyalty side of things with considerable interest.

Jack