We're the Google Flights team, makers of flight search related stuff. Ask us anything!

Hi everyone! I'm a big fan of your product, and really love how efficient and easy it is to use. That being said, I have a few questions:

• Will you ever integrate the PPM(price per mile) feature that the ITA Matrix(that you acquired) has?

• What is your personal favorite feature about Google Flights?

• Will there ever be email or Google Now alerts that can show price drops/increases, instead of just notifications when you go to the website itself?

• Is there any possibility of adding a student price feature, like those available on studentuniverse.com? (I dream big, I doubt this will happen)

• Will you ever offer a feature to aggregate or track frequent flyer programs, something along the lines of AwardWallet but maybe integrated in Google Now, just like how flight itineraries have been?

• Any plans for an android app?

EDIT: Phrasing!

re alerts… we have Google Now alerts based on itineraries you’ve saved! https://plus.google.com/+google/posts/1rMJ88znvCg

re PPM listings, special pricing, frequent flyer number tracking, mobile apps… we’ve previously gotten (and appreciated) feedback on these things :). It’s a big challenge to juggle priorities, assessing what will make the greatest number of travelers happy, what will work well with our partners, and so on. Thanks for the votes!

I've lost confidence in Google maintaining my privacy. How can I be assured that your application is not another tool to track me?

Does Google overall, or your Flight Team specifically, obtain finanical assistance from any government entity to develop your software and algorithims?

Who is your biggest competitor?

When it comes to data sharing and privacy, we design our products based on three principles: transparency, choice, and control. We want you to understand the information you share on Google, and have granular tools that put you in control of it. We've made some recent improvements here too, check this out: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/06/privacy-security-tools-improvements.html

First. I'd like to say thank you for making an amazing tool which works so well and fluidly. I often go on it for fun to see where I could go with 'x' amount of money.

I was wondering if there will be any chance of being able to compare flights by area or region. For example, I live in NW England and I have about 3 nearby international airports and it'd be great to be able to say all airports in England or list several airports.

And also, what would need to be done for Google to analyse patterns and try to predict when the cheapest flight will be available for booking for going on a certain date?

Keep up the amazing work you do! Your amazing tool meant I could go on holiday this summer because I could see where was cheapest to fly to. Literally, you have made my summer.

I don't have any big substantive thing to add, maps, but just wanted to thank you for the kind words. Stuff like that makes our day! And I hope you have a wonderful trip!

I could be wrong, but why does there seem to be so little marketing for Google Flights? It's such a good service, yet this is the only promo video that was made for the service.

You mean the love of redditors is not sufficient? :o

Joking aside, we’ll look into ways we can help more people learn about Flights, and thanks for the kind words about the service :).

Would you please add support for long layovers? If travelling with stopovers, I like to extend them to ~24 hours to explore a city on route. It's quite common. Currently, I have to use Kayak to achieve this but I would prefer Google Flights.

That's a neat idea; I like to do the same thing sometimes. Making a note of it but don't hesitate to drop suggestions like this to us via our Send Feedback channel (on Flights, lefthand menu).

Google flights is great.

1) When will you guys incorporate some of liveatc and flightaware type features?

2) What is your take (anyone) on Skiplagged? Will Google also have a 'hidden city' ticketing feature?

I'm gonna venture a guess that legal precedent needs to be set for hidden city ticketing before Google adds that feature.

If I didn't know what that meant, I would imagine you were talking about flights to El Dorado or Atlantis.

"Yes, Google, I'd like to book this flight to Constantinople."

cue They Might Be Giants

Only Particle Man can book that one.

Did you know that to make a link, you can put the link text in square brackets and the URL in parentheses immediately following?

I don't mean to come off as snarky, but this comment would get deleted if it didn't contain a question.

That's my bad! And sincerely thanks for the clue-in. Should be fixed now in the intro note :) (I had put both parts in brackets mistakenly).

Google Flights is super useful and convenient, thank you all for creating it.

Question: Is there a reason the page is google.com/flights instead of flights.google.com ? I ask because the latter would be easier to remember and more in line with other google products (maps, mail, docs, etc.)

flights.google.com already redirects to google.com/flights :)

So it does, awesome. It didn't when I was looking for flights last Christmas. Thanks for the update.

It should have worked all along. Which is kinda my doing, though I'm not on that team. But back when Google flight search was being tested internally and not public yet, I emailed the team asking "why can't we have this on flights.google.com?" and they responded oh sure that sounds good, and did it very quickly.

We aim to please :)

Any way to add a feature that would filter on layover? Say I don't want a layover less than 1:30 or more than 8hrs?

No layover-specific filters, but you may find it useful to tweak the Duration filter (under more) as a proxy.

How many of you use Google+ ?

I'll just speak for myself personally; I use and like Google+. I've uploaded 20K+ photos from my travels there and have made a couple cool friends just from related chats :).

This isn't specific to your team or what you are working on. However Google is said to be one of the best companies to work for. Do you feel this is true? Why or why not?

We have indeed been featured as a 'Best' company in various magazines and such, but I can just offer you my personal impression: I really enjoy being a Googler.

This coming March'll be my 10 year mark at Google, and while I've had some stressful and frustrating times (like in any job), I've also really had some awesome experiences that I'm grateful for. I've worked with some crazy-smart and nice people, and gotten to tackle stuff in Search, Maps, and (now) Travel stuff, which has been very exciting for me!

One thing I've especially enjoyed is the combination of being in Engineering (as a Program Manager) and also getting to engage with our (for lack of a better term) users. Sometimes I can feel a bit stuck in the middle (e.g., when users have great and important ideas, but various things keep us from implementing them at the moment), but more often I love being plugged in from both sides and helping make lots of people happy internally and externally.

Whew. Okay, that was quite a ramble. I'm running on low food-fuel (gotta go get dinner!), but hope this one data point was interesting/useful, and thanks for being a part of our first AMA :)

Would you rather fight 747 duck-sized planes or one 747-sized duck?

Depends on which would be more likely to make it through TSA and fit in the overhead compartment(s).