To do: Set up a city alert on www.airfarewatchdog.com for your home city and a route alert
In our last post, I outlined five great resources for saving money on cash flights. For the next few posts we’ll take a look at some ways to utilize these resources. Up first, airfarewatchdog.com!
What is airfarewatchdog?
Airfarewatchdog is a site dedicated to finding the best airfare prices everyday. For the last ten years they have searched for cheap prices from anywhere you can think of in the United States. With the sheer volume of airfare prices they list, it can be easy to get overwhelmed, so here are some steps you can take to best utilize the site for your needs.
1. Sign up for an account
Signing up is super easy, you don’t even need to come up with a password! Just enter your e-mail address and later you will be prompted to enter your home airport. Nothing could be easier.
2. Set up an alert for cheap fares from your hometown or to a regularly visited location
You can sign up for all sorts of e-mail alerts with airfarewatchdog. One alert I particularly like is the Departure City (or Arrival City) alert. Basically, you choose a city and airfarewatchdog will send you an alert with a list of the cheapest fares FROM that city (Departure) or TO that city (Arrival).
Once you’ve chosen the city, you can refine your alerts in two ways.
First, you can choose how often you’d like an e-mail. My guess is you don’t want to be spammed daily so go for a few times a week or weekly at most.
Another great thing you can do is give airfarewatchdog a list of carriers you don’t want to fly. Just add them to the list and then they won’t be included in your alert e-mails. Pretty neat.
3. Set up an alert searching cheap fares for routes you fly often
Another nice alert you can set is a City to City alert. Is there some place you have your eye on? Airfarewatchdog can alert you whenever prices to that city look pretty good. For example, I have a standing alert between Boston and Hong Kong.
I’ll get e-mails from time to time alerting me when flights to Hong Kong are fairly cheap. You can’t set a price threshold (which would be great), but I’ll get e-mails from time to time telling me that flights to Hong Kong are pretty cheap. You can set up as many of these as you’d like, and it seems to me they only e-mail when the price meets some (invisible) threshold. My guess is they just compare to historic prices.
If you like to go visit the same place a few times a year and are flexible in schedule, City to City alerts can be super useful.
4. Follow airfarewatchdog on Twitter
This is pretty simple, but you can follow @airfarewatchdog. They tweet out all sorts of alerts, but they mostly focus on the cheapest and best deals. One thing I like when they tweet deals is they sometimes compare the price to what it normally looks like. I find this useful for reference.
If you use Tweetdeck you can also create a column dedicated to airfarewatchdog and your home city. It’s pretty simple, first you just click search and then search for @airfarewatchdog and your home city (Boston for me). After that, just click on “Add Column” and you’ll have a column dedicated to every time airfarewatchdog tweets about Boston. So if you don’t want to see ALL the deals they post, you can just use that column to monitor the ones you want.
I’d recommend doing this for @theflightdeal as well and any other similar sites that you like.
Final Thoughts
There are some other neat things on www.airfarewatchdog.com like the Top 50 fares list (the site’s best picks for the day), but for the most part I just use these alerts to keep me apprised of fares. Hopefully this post has helped you get started searching and booking those cheap air fares as well! Up next: The Flight Deal!
To do: Set up a city alert on www.airfarewatchdog.com for your home city and a route alert
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[…] series, I implement things that I’ve 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 […]