Tired of waiting at airports? Google Flight can ‘predict’ flight delays

You are still advisable to show up at the airport on time

By: Shweta Ganjoo |
February 2, 2018 6:13 pm

The only thing worse than missing your flight is to arrive at the airport on time, only to realise that your flight has been delayed for hours and there’s nothing you can do besides sit in a corner and sip an over-priced cup of coffee. And while airlines do inform passengers about delays in their flight schedules, they’re often too late in passing on the message. Costing passengers both time, and at times money.

And now, Google has found a simple solution to this problem. The tech giant has upgraded its online flight booking and search service – Google Flights – and powered it with its powerful machine learning algorithm. The upgrade enables the service to predict the delays in the flights, even before the airlines do.

Google Flights (Photo: Google blog)

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“Using historic flight status data, our machine learning algorithms can predict some delays even when this information isn’t available from airlines yet,” Google Flights Product Manager, Anket Mathur wrote in a blog.

But there’s a catch. While the system predicts the delays with an accuracy of 80 percent, Google still advises passengers to reach the airport “with enough time to spare”. To put it simply, don’t trust the predictions blindly just yet.

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So how do you check for delays?
It’s simple. All you need to do is look for your flight number or the airline and the flight route in Google Flights, and these flights will simply appear in your search results.

Bon Voyage folks!