Last post I talked about how to use airfarewatchdog to find cheap airplane tickets. The reality is, though, for some people, www.airfarewatchdog.com might be too much information: they list a lot of fares. The Flight Deal is a site I love as much as airfarewatchdog and using it might be more appealing to someone people.
The two sites have one major difference. The Flight Deal tends to focus more on certain cities. From their Twitter description: “The Flight Deal – Curated Daily Travel Deals from NYC / BOS / PHL / DC / MIA / DFW / PHX / LAX / SFO / PDX / SEA and ORD. 24/7/365.”
The positives of this are easy to see: the website has a laser sharp focus and won’t bombard you with the deluge of information you might get from airfarewatchdog. The negatives, of course, are also obvious. While they do cover some other cities if the deal is amazing, The Flight Deal works best for people who live in the above cities.
Try the following with The Flight Deal to save on cash fares.
Follow The Flight Deal on Twitter
As I mentioned in the family travel hacking social media post, definitely make The Flight Deal one of the accounts you follow. Since I live in Boston, I see a lot of deals for my hometown. If you live in any of those cities, you’ll see deals at least a few times a week.
If you don’t live in those cities you can still glean value from following. If all the deals to other cities makes you jealous, just create a column in Tweetdeck focused on @TheFlightDeal and your home airport. I outlined how to do this with airfarewatchdog; use the exact same process. The Flight Deal also does this nice thing where they include the airline code, so you can add “UA” to your search if you only want to fly United. Just look up the airline codes on Wikipedia if you don’t know them.
Add The Flight Deal to your RSS reader
Though RSS is less in vogue than the glorious Google Reader days, a lot of people still use it. An RSS reader basically takes all the articles from any given website (or feed) and packages it into a reader for you. A lot of people like to use Feedly, while I personally use Newsblur.
To sign up for The Flight Deal’s RSS feed, you can either throw this link into your RSS reader or just click the RSS link on the sidebar at The Flight Deal’s website.
You can also RSS low fares from your home city only (provided it is one of the cities The Flight Deal monitors). Yihwan has a great list of these at the end of this post. In fact I’d bookmark that page.
But basically the RSS feed is: http://www.theflightdeal.com/category/flight-deals/XXX/feed
What you put in XXX is city dependent, check out his post for the list.
Use IFTTT to have The Flight Deal send you e-mails
Again, all credit to Yihwan for writing this up. I’ll just give you the short version, but his version is more detailed and contains more neat ideas for IFTTT.
You can subscribe to The Flight Deal on its website but you will get e-mails with all the cities. Instead, you can use IFTTT to just get e-mails of deals from the cities you want.
- Go to IFTTT.com. Sign up if you haven’t.
- Click “create recipe” then click “This”
“New feed item matches” can make your searches even more specific. I suggest playing around with it - Click “Feed”, choose “New Feed Item”
- Cut and paste the RSS feed URL you want to monitor, click “Create Trigger”
- Click “That”
Click e-mail for your “that” and your recipe is done! - Find “E-mail”, fill in the subject and body for yourself.
- Profit.
IFTTT is a super powerful tool and in my opinion the best way to pare down all the deals sites like The Flight Deal have to offer. You can of course use it with airfarewatchdog or any other similar sites.
Final Thoughts
Where airfarewatchdog paints with a broad brush, The Flight Deal works with precision. If you live in one of the cities they cover you are pretty much golden. If not, you can still set up alerts from your own city (it’s not like they ignore everywhere else). This is a good time to start getting used to IFTTT though: there’s a lot you can use it for to make your life easier.
[…] written about. Thus, I now have a column dedicated to @airfarewatchdog tweets about Boston and receive e-mails from The Flight Deal about cheap flights to/from Boston. While both those alerts help me find deals, neither addresses a […]