Google’s Travel AI Upgrade Reviewed: AI Mode Canvas, Conversational Flight Deals, and Review Summaries in Maps

A new AI Mode “Canvas” builds itineraries beside live maps and hotel data, Google Flights adds conversational deal hunting, and Gemini is being threaded deeper into Maps, all while travel brands brace for fewer clicks and higher costs to stay visible.

19 December 2025 Google is making its boldest play yet for the travel planning moment, the part of the journey where people bounce between ten tabs, a group chat, and a half-finished Notes app list of restaurants they swear they will remember. The company is now testing a travel focused experience inside Search that generates day by day itineraries and holds them in a side panel “Canvas,” with flights, hotels, and Maps details presented alongside the plan instead of scattered across the open web.

For travelers, the pitch is simple: less research fatigue, fewer back-and-forth hops between apps, and faster decisions powered by Google’s biggest advantage, its index of the web plus the living database that is Maps. For the travel industry, the move is more ominous: if planning happens inside Google, fewer users will click out to the sites that have historically owned the early funnel, including online travel agencies and hotel brands.

What is new, and where it lives

Google’s new travel push is not a single feature, it is a bundle that stretches across Search, Flights, and Maps:

• AI Mode + Canvas (Search): a side-by-side planning workspace that turns prompts into an itinerary and keeps it editable over time.
• Flight Deals (Google Flights): a conversational, AI-powered way to find bargains by describing the trip you want instead of filtering endlessly.
• Hotel price tracking (Google Hotels): price drop alerts for hotels, similar to flight tracking, tuned to your dates, filters, and map area.
• Gemini in Maps: more conversational help in navigation and discovery, with AI assist woven into getting around and finding places.
• AI summaries of places and reviews: condensed “what people say” snapshots powered by Gemini models, built on review content.

How Canvas travel planning works in practice

Canvas is the clearest signal of what Google wants travel planning to become: a single workspace that behaves like a living document.

1) You start with a prompt, not a destination page
Instead of searching “Tokyo itinerary” and stitching together advice, you tell AI Mode what you want, for example: “Plan a 5-day foodie trip to Tokyo for a family, include neighborhoods, and keep transit time reasonable.” Canvas then generates an itinerary in the side panel.

2) The plan is built from three streams of information
Google says Canvas pulls together:

• real-time Search data for flights and hotels
• Maps details like photos and reviews
• “relevant information from sites across the web”

That matters because it explains why the results feel less like a chat answer and more like an assembled briefing: options, comparisons, and logistics are meant to sit next to each other.

3) The magic is in follow-ups and tradeoffs
Google is explicitly positioning Canvas as iterative. You can ask for tradeoffs like “cheaper hotel vs closer to brunch,” then re-balance the plan. This is where generative AI is most useful in travel: not inventing a list of landmarks, but negotiating constraints, time, budget, walking distance, and priorities.

4) It is designed to be saved and resumed
Canvas plans persist via AI Mode history, so the itinerary is not a one-off answer you lose after closing a tab.

Availability note: Google says Canvas travel planning is currently available on desktop in the U.S. for users opted into the AI Mode experiment in Labs.

Flight Deals: a different kind of “cheap flights” search

Google Flights has always been powerful, but it has also been a tool that rewards people who enjoy tweaking filters. Flight Deals is meant for everyone else.

How it works
You describe where, when, and how you want to travel “like you’re talking to a friend,” and Google says the system uses AI to interpret the request and surface bargains.

What changed recently
Google says Flight Deals has begun rolling out to 200+ countries and territories with 60+ languages, expanding beyond its earlier limited launch.

What it is good for

• Flexible travelers who are destination-curious
• “I want to go somewhere warm in February” type planning
• Quickly scanning for value without setting ten filters

Price tracking, and the part Google rarely advertises: prediction nudges

Google’s most traveler-friendly AI is often the least flashy: the alerts that stop you from overpaying.

Flights: price tracking plus “likely to go up” warnings
Google Flights can notify you when prices drop, and it can also send emails when prices for a tracked route are likely to go up, including an estimate and confidence level.

Hotels: price tracking now mirrors flight alerts
Hotel price tracking can send an email if prices go down substantially for hotels in your results, and Google says it accounts for your filters (like star rating) and the map area you are viewing. Google described this as launching globally on mobile and desktop browsers.

Maps gets more “askable,” and summaries get shorter

Where Canvas is about pre-trip planning, Maps is about the trip itself.

Gemini in Maps, navigation edition
Google is rolling out a more conversational, hands-free experience in Maps built with Gemini capabilities, plus features like landmark-based navigation and proactive traffic alerts.

AI summaries: the two-sentence verdict layer
Google’s Maps Platform documentation describes AI-powered review summaries as summaries generated from user reviews, synthesizing key elements like place attributes and sentiment. Separately, Google has pushed Gemini-powered summaries for places, areas, and reviews into broader availability for developers through the Places API.

For travelers, this is the “tell me why this place is worth it” shortcut. For businesses, it is the uneasy reality that a huge chunk of their reputation may be compressed into a few lines.

Booking is the next frontier, and Google is saying the quiet part out loud

Right now, Google frames this as planning help plus links out. But it is already sketching the next step: completing hotel and flight bookings inside AI Mode.

Google says it intends to let users compare flights or hotels (schedules, prices, room photos, amenities, reviews) and then “quickly complete the booking with the partner of your choice,” naming partners including Booking.com, Expedia, Marriott, Wyndham, IHG, and Choice Hotels.

That direction is a big reason travel investors reacted quickly when these features were announced, with coverage noting declines in major OTA stocks amid fears Google could keep more of the journey inside its own interface.

Why travel brands are nervous: the click squeeze becomes structural

The travel industry has lived with “Google as toll booth” for years, especially through ad spending. What changes with AI Overviews and AI Mode is that Google can answer more questions directly on the results page, reducing the need to click out.

A marketing industry report published today described travel and hospitality brands rethinking search strategy as AI Overviews squeeze clicks and make visibility harder to sustain through traditional keyword playbooks. More broadly, consulting and media analysis over the last year has highlighted the rise of “zero-click” behavior, where users get what they need without leaving Google, which can translate into material declines in organic traffic for publishers and brands.

How travelers can actually use these tools without getting burned

Generative AI is great at compressing complexity, and occasionally terrible at being precise. The best way to use Google’s new travel AI is to treat it like a planner, not a final authority.

A practical workflow

• Use Canvas to draft the structure: neighborhoods, pacing, day-by-day flow.
• Use Maps to verify the basics: hours, transit time, closures, and recent reviews.
• Use Flight Deals to explore value, then validate on the airline site or your preferred booking channel.
• Turn on price tracking early for both flights and hotels, because the alerts only help after you start watching.

Two smart habits

• Ask Canvas to cite specifics in its own output, like exact museum hours, reservation requirements, and transit assumptions, then verify.
• When a summary says a hotel or restaurant is “known for” something, open recent reviews and look for recency patterns (construction noise, staffing changes, renovations).

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