Google Flights Tests Guaranteed Price Program

Google Flights is testing a price guarantee program that will pay you money if the price of a ticket drops after you book it through the service. According to a Monday blog post, the feature is currently available in the US as a “pilot program” for specific flights, but it could be a persuasive reason to use Google’s tool the next time you’re looking for a ticket.

Some trips will have a shield icon with a dollar sign when you use Google’s tool. If you book that ticket through Google Flights, the company promises to “monitor the price every day until departure” and refund the difference if it falls.

Currently, it only offers price guarantees for trips departing from the United States, and you can only get them if you have a US billing address and phone number. The company also states that it is “only available for flights where we are confident that the price will not drop.”

According to a lengthy help document from Google, you can only get $500 back per calendar year and no money back if the price differential is less than $5. You will also receive the refund via Google Pay, which you must activate within 90 days of getting notification that it is available.

You must, of course, purchase your tickets through Google Flights.

If you already have Google Pay set up, you should receive the difference within 48 hours of taking off, according to the firm.

Price guarantees aren’t uncommon among ticket sites; Priceline and Orbitz, as well as some specific airlines, offer partial refunds under certain conditions. However, instead of continuously monitoring for a better price, they typically require you to go looking for one.

Another feature mentioned in Google’s blog post is the ability to explore hotels in an area using a “swipeable story format,” which displays a slideshow of a hotel that you can swipe up on to be shown another hotel. Everything is getting stories these days, and it appears that Google Maps is no exception.

Hard Cap on Google Drive

Meanwhile, According to Ars Technica, Google has imposed a hard cap on the number of files Drive users can store in a single account.(Opens in a new tab). The rollout happened unexpectedly, and many paying Drive users were abruptly locked out of new file uploads.

According to Ars Technica, the file limit was not a bug, as some Reddit users had assumed. According to a Google spokesperson, the restriction is “a safeguard to prevent misuse of our system in a way that may impact the stability and safety of the system.”

While the surprise rollout that has been impacting accounts for months may appear to be frightening, it is not. Google imposes a file restriction of up to 5 million. The typical user’s Drive account is nowhere near that number, and the company told Ars Technica that “the number of impacted users here is vanishingly small.”

However, Google made no public announcement about the surprise launch. According to Ars Technica, the file limit has been in effect since at least February, with users being left in the dark with no reason. This is particularly troubling for those who pay a lot of money for Google Workspace plan packages.

The company costs a whopping $150/month for 30TB of storage with Google One, and with a “enterprise” plan, Google promises(Opens in a new tab) “as much storage as you need.” Needless to say, a hard cap on the number of individual files undermines this claim.