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Airfarewatchdog.com is the only airfare alert site that includes fares on *all* airlines.  Our team of expert fare hounds will let you know when airfares are a great buy. 

Q: What does that cute little red asterisk mean?  

A: We put that little guy next to sale fares that are unadvertised and want you to know that they are extremely time-sensitive and could disappear at any moment?

Q: But why would unadvertised sale fares disappear?  Can't you guys make them stick around?

A: Fares that are unadvertised (but that we have found anyway!) are part of the daily fare wars between the folks at the airlines.  It's kind of like a poker game where they continuously try to undercut each other in price whenever it's time to update fares.  This can happen up to three times a day, and that's why a great price can appear and disappear suddenly.

Q: I see a fare that I like and I’m soooo excited. What do I do?

A: The first thing you do is take your index finger and click. Directly on the fare itself, that’s it. Do that? Good! You are now well on your way to finding a really good deal. Each of our fares is hyper-linked to an “Airfare details” page. On it will be info that will help you book the fare, including the fare period, days of the week you can travel, and whether seats are plentiful, spotty or scarce. Best of all there will be a link to the next step under the heading “How to book and buy this fare,” which is usually a link to a results page on a booking site like Travelocity or Orbitz (which will save you time) or to the airline’s website (we wish we could take you to a results page for those as well, but they don’t allow us to, so you’ll have to hunt and peck a bit.) From there, all you’ll have to do is find an available date, which is sometimes easy and sometimes not so easy.

Q: I want to get information about the amazing sale fares that you list, but there are so many choices of newsletter fare alert emails. Which one should I choose and how do I sign up?

A: To sign up just click on the “My Alert Settings" link from our homepage. It’s in the menu on the left. Once you’re there you can choose one or all three of the following options:

Domestic (US/Canada) Departure City Alerts – This is our general, all-purpose informative newsletter. You will be able to choose the frequency of delivery (Daily, Frequently or Weekly) for this email newsletter, which will contain a listing of all current sale fares that we have found for travel originating from this city. This will include fares for travel to both domestic and international destinations, as well as last-minute weekend fares put on sale by airlines trying to decrease unsold inventory. We have listed alternate airports in this newsletter for your convenience as well. We include short snippets of current air-travel related news and helpful hints from our resident experts.

Arrival City Alerts - This is for those of you who want to see the list of cities in the US and Canada for which we have found low sale fares for travel to your chosen  destination. We’ll send you an email whenever we find new deals to a city like London, New York,  Paris, Tokyo, San Francisco, Atlanta or Buenos Aires from all over the US and Canada. Even if your home airport isn’t listed, you can use the information to construct your own itinerary from an airport that’s farther away, but has a great deal to your chosen destination. You can also use this information to track prices from other cities for comparison purposes. These emails are not delivered on a fixed schedule, but go out depending on when there are new fares to report.

City-to-City Fare Alerts - This nifty little service is for those of you with narrower, more specific interests. Enter two airports and we send you an email only when we find a sale fare for that particular route. No more, no less. Delivery only happens if we have news for you. If we find fares for your route a lot, you’ll be hearing from us quite often. If it’s a route that doesn’t get discounted regularly, it could be weeks between emails.


General Newsletter page tips:
The first time you sign up for any of our email alerts, make sure you click on the “sign me up” button after you’ve entered your information.

For those of you changing or adding to your preferences, make sure you click on the “update” buttons after you’ve entered or deleted information and get a confirmation message at the bottom of the page to make sure that your new preferences were noted.

You can choose up to seven alerts for each category of alert. A new box or set of boxes should appear underneath the ones that are already filled in, whenever you enter information. If that doesn’t happen, just hit the update button and the new blank ones will appear. (This is a "sometimes" glitch that we hope to resolve.)

Q: There’s a fare from yesterday’s newsletter that I want, and when I clicked on it, I got an "update" or "fare expired" message, but no fare!  You guys are bogus!!

A: First of all, take a deep breath.  Inhale.  Exhale.  Let it out… now, don’t you feel better?  We really can’t emphasize enough how time-sensitive these fares are. Why?  Well, many of the fares we find and list are part of the unadvertised price wars between the airlines.  They update, change, and delete these fares up to three times a day (not to mention sell-out of them, because they are limited in availability.)  In many ways it’s like the stock market and if you see a price that you like, you should act fast or it may be too late. If you happen to see a fare you like from an old email that was sent to you on another day, check your airport’s fare page on our website first to see if it's still current (keeping in mind that it's been selling steadily the entire time!)  Our newsletters tend to have a short "shelf life."  

Q: I saw a fare for “XYZ Airlines” listed on your site for $23 RT and I didn’t click directly on the fare like you told me, instead I called “XYZ Airlines” to make a reservation and the phone rep said there was no such fare, and they had never heard of you.  I had to pay $2000.00 more and take out a second mortgage.  Why, oh why, do you hate me so?!

A: Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but this kind of thing does happen way too often and we don’t like it.  First of all, never, never, ever leave the computer to find these web-based fares.  Many of them are only available online.  Secondly, we don’t want to sound paranoid, but really, what motivation do the airlines have to lead you by the hand to the cheapest fare?  If you were in a management position for a financially strapped industry, wouldn’t you encourage your phone reps to say, they’d never heard of the cheap sale fare, hmmm? Please, stay off the phone!!  Email us if you have a problem.  We’re here to help.

Q: Hey! One of your fare listings says “travel through (fill in date here)” and I tried to book a fare leaving Friday night after work of the (fill in major holiday here) weekend and coming back Sunday night, when everybody else wants to fly, in time to be well-rested for work on Monday . My itinerary falls within the dates covered in your listing, so why didn’t I get that fare?! It must be a “bait and switch” on your part!!

A: We’d like to take this opportunity to address the difference between the fare period and date availability. Not all dates are going to be available within a fare period, especially around the holidays and peak travel days such as weekends (not to mention any blackout dates that the airline institutes.) Flexible travel dates will increase your chances of booking a sale fare, as will traveling mid-week as opposed to weekends (although people do book weekend sale fares all the time.)

Q: Speaking of dates, why do those calendars on the booking sites (that shall remain nameless) show all those dates, which then disappear when you click on them? It’s so annoying!

A: We couldn’t agree more. We find those calendars frustrating to use too. Apparently they like to tease us with what was available before they actually show us what is available. Right now, however, they’re the only game in town for flexible date searches and really, having flexible travel dates is the easiest, most effective way to find the sale fares that we list.

Q: There’s a great sale fare listed for members of Virgin America’s eleVAte program or Southwest’s DING! Fare specials, or American’s DealFinder users, etc.… how do I get those fares?  Can’t I just go to the website or call them and get those deals?

A: First of all, no calling!  What did we say about staying off the phone?  These fares are for participants in these programs, so we encourage you to join.  You can really get some great deals this way and we list these fares for the many of you who are already members and for the rest of you, who haven’t joined yet , we want to let you know what amazing fares could be available to you.  So join already!  And remember, sometimes you can’t get access to the sale fares that were announced before you joined, but you’ll be eligible for any deal after that.  Now that ‘s a good thing!

Q: Whenever I click on one of your fares and find what I want, it won’t let me buy more than one ticket.  Are these fares only good for people traveling alone?

A: Our links are pre-set for one traveler for a round-trip ticket, but it’s a simple process to book other travel plans. To book one-way (“OW”) tickets and/or multiple travelers you can apply the same process:  Find an itinerary and available dates that suit you.  Write down or remember the aforesaid itinerary and dates.  Go back to the home page of the booking site and reset your search parameters for a one-way ticket or for more than one traveler.  Enter the available dates and desired itinerary and voila!  If the fare is available for more than one traveler, the results should come right back up for you at the same price per ticket.  Ditto for one-way travel.  See, that was simple, wasn’t it?!

Note:  We have read in a number of articles that sometimes to get sale fares, you must buy your multiple tickets “one at a time,” because the sale fares are pre-set on the booking site to show up as only available for single ticket purchases.  If you do this, it’s possible that your single tickets may each be priced differently, or worse yet, the flight is sold-out before you can buy all the tickets that you need.  Just something to keep in mind.

Q. Why don’t you have the route that I’m looking for on your site?  I’ve seen it there before and now that I need it, it’s not there.  

A: If you’re not seeing your desired route or if your city-to-city alert hasn’t been coming as often as you’d like, it’s because the price for that route is currently pretty high and we haven’t found any fares that are anything out of the ordinary.  Since we’re a low sale fare listing site, our lists never remain the same, but change constantly, depending on what fares we feel are a good deal and value for our users.  Hold on, the next sale could be just around the corner!

Q. When is the best time to purchase the fare for my route?  You have a pretty decent fare listed right now that fits in with my plans, but I want to get the best price.  Should I wait for something even lower to come along?

A: We’re not psychic and we would never venture to predict when a fare is absolutely going to hit rock bottom.  But we firmly believe that a good fare in the hand is worth way more than the possible-maybe-iffy-bargain-basement/fire-sale fare in the future that most likely will not appear.  Generally, we find that once a route has been discounted and has sold-out at that price, the airlines don’t usually need to or want to put it on sale again, and then if they do, only at the very, very last minute.  That’s way too much stress for most of us here, because if that fare doesn’t go on sale and you have to be somewhere, you’ll be stuck paying the same high price as the last-minute business traveler, who’s traveling on his company’s dime.  We don’t think we need to remind you whose dime you’ll be traveling on!


Q. Okay, but what if I don’t see my route listed as a sale fare right now?  Then when is the best time to purchase my tickets?

A:  Keep track of the fare periods for sale fares to your destination.  Not just from your home airport, but other cities as well.  When the dates that you are going to travel start appearing in sale fare listings, that’s when you know that the time for any discount that may be coming is upon you.  Our Arrival City alerts can help you do this, as well as our City to City alerts.  


Q. But last year, when I was tracking this fare they had a fabulous last-minute sale, so I should wait for that this year, right?

A:  Uh, no.  Any sale fare is the result of a reaction to current market conditions such as the price of jet fuel, the willingness of the travel consumer to spend, the popularity of a given destination at the time, how many seats have been sold for a particular route, the overall economic health of an airline and the economy in general.  The decision to put any fare on sale at a discount is made according to these and other factors at the present time.  That’s why it is very difficult sometimes for us to guess when or how a sale is going to occur.

Q. I signed up for a newsletter and I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting for it to show up…

A:
    1. Make sure that farealert@airfarewatchdog.com is in your known sender, contacts, or address book, or you may not receive our newsletter due to SPAM controls built into many email systems.  Look in your SPAM folder to see if we’re in it.
    2. Remember that only the Departure City alert is delivered regularly, the International Arrival City alert and the City to City alert is only sent out if we have a sale fare to report to you.
    3.  For our users who have signed up for fare information about some of the smaller airports that we cover, if there is not a lot going on, we sometimes opt not to send out these newsletters just for the sake of sending.  If regular delivery is important to you, sign up for a larger airport that you use occasionally and you’ll get all the news that’s fit to print.


Q. My newsletter used to come all the time and suddenly it stopped, what should I do?

A:
    1.    Double-check your newsletter account settings, just in case.
    2.    Find out if your internet service provider has updated or changed its SPAM control system.
    3.    See 1., 2. & 3. from the previous question.
    4.    Contact your internet service provider to see if they have a notion as to why we can’t get past whatever blocks they’re putting up.
    5.    Email us; however, if we do confirm that the newsletters have been sent out for your airport, we rarely can fix the problem from our end. All we can do is send and it’s up to your internet service provider to make sure that the mail that you want is delivered to you and ends up in your mailbox, not trapped in their SPAM filters.
    6.    When all else fails, try signing up with another email address with a different domain name.  99.9% of the time, this will fix the issue.


Q. I’m trying to sign up for more newsletter alerts or change my account settings and I’m having trouble getting the boxes to let me type my cities in.  Help!

A: All of the city/airport boxes on our site have an auto-fill function.  Type slowly and let the prompt menu appear, then click on the airport that you want in the menu to finish filling in the box.  Remember to click the “update” button whenever you’ve added new information.

Q. “What gives?”

A:  This little phrase is such a favorite and yet, it puzzles us.  We see it over and over again.  It’s usually added to a query, well after the question has been asked or long after the facts of the inquiry have been quite clearly laid out.  And really, what does it actually mean?  We’ve decided to answer this question literally.  “What gives?”  Well actually, a whole lot of things, but in answering your question we’d like to focus on the many wonderful organizations that make this a better world to live in.  For example, The American Cancer Society, UNICEF, The American Red Cross, the ASPCA, The Girl Scouts of America, the World Wildlife Fund… well, you get the idea.  There are so many great organizations that give and give and give.  We’d like to encourage you to do the same.   So the next time you feel inclined to ask, “What gives?”  Why don’t you just answer, “I do!”  And make a generous contribution to the charity of your choice.