Google opens booking abroad

Google is turning one search box into a reservation hunter in more countries, so a query like “table for four tonight in Vancouver” can now check live availability across booking sites instead of sending you into five separate apps. In Canada, Google says the feature starts April 10, 2026 inside Artificial Intelligence Mode in Search. (blog.google) The new tool does not finish the booking for you on Google itself. It builds a short list of restaurants with open slots and then sends you to partners such as OpenTable and Libro to lock the table in. (blog.google) This is Google taking a feature it first tested in the United States and moving it outward. In August 2025, the company said restaurant reservations were the first “agentic” task in Artificial Intelligence Mode, and that United States access was limited to Google Artificial Intelligence Ultra subscribers using a Labs experiment. (blog.google) Google’s pitch is simple: people do not search for dinner in neat keywords anymore. The company says users now ask full sentences with constraints like party size, time, neighborhood, cuisine, and dietary rules, and Artificial Intelligence Mode is built to unpack those details in one pass. (blog.google) Under the hood, Google says the system mixes live web browsing from Project Mariner with direct booking partners, Google Maps data, and the company’s Knowledge Graph, which is its giant index of places and facts. That is how it can compare restaurant websites and reservation services at the same time instead of acting like a normal list of blue links. (blog.google) The international push matters because Artificial Intelligence Mode itself only became broadly global in stages. Google rolled it out to more than 40 new countries and territories in October 2025, and said the product had reached more than 200 countries and territories in total. (blog.google) Google has been using travel as the easiest place to teach people this new style of search. In November 2025, it added Canvas for trip planning and expanded Flight Deals to more than 200 countries and territories, which shows the company wants Search to move from “find information” to “help finish the errand.” (blog.google) The restaurant feature follows that same pattern: start with a messy real-world task, collect live options, and hand off the final transaction. In Canada, Google’s own example is “Find a table for four at an Aburi sushi place in Vancouver for Friday at 6 p.m.,” which is the kind of request that used to mean opening Maps, OpenTable, Resy, and a restaurant’s own site one by one. (blog.google) Google is also tailoring the partner list by country instead of forcing one global booking network everywhere. In the United States it named partners including OpenTable, Resy, and Tock, while reporting on the United Kingdom rollout says links there can point to services such as DesignMyNight, SevenRooms, and TheFork. (blog.google) (verdictfoodservice.com) That local approach is probably why this story is showing up market by market instead of as one giant global launch. Search is becoming less like a directory and more like a concierge, but the concierge still needs to know which booking desk each country actually uses. (blog.google 1) (blog.google 2)