The first travel website I found truly game-changing was Kayak. Better websites and better functions exist, but I still find myself going back to Kayak time and time again.

As I write this 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 both those alerts help me find deals, neither addresses a common need for family travelers: monitoring flights when both your location and dates are more or less set. Enter Kayak alerts.

Kayak has a great feature where you can send yourself e-mails updating price changes. Here’s how to easily set up Kayak alerts.

1. Sign up for a free account

As usual with these sites, everything starts here.

2. Do a search for your flight on the dates you want to travel

Pretty straightforward step here.

3. Take note of the advice to buy or wait in the top left corner

For a lot of flights, Kayak has a nice price predictor in the top left corner. Though I don’t always go by it, the graph gives you a sense of how the price has been fluctuating. Sometimes if the price is low enough and Kayak says “buy” there’s no real point in waiting – better to miss out on a fare drop then get saddled with a fare increase!

4. Click on “create a price alert”

Right below the buy or wait graph you can create a price alert. That will set Kayak up to automatically monitor that route on your preferred dates and send you regular alerts.

5. Update your preferences 

If you navigate to your preferences, you can refine your price alerts. For starters, you can choose what days of the week you want Kayak to send you e-mails. If you’re obsessive you can have them send fares to you every day; if not, a couple times a week or even weekly is fine (in general, airfare doesn’t fluctuate THAT wildly).

Another nice feature is “flexible dates”. You can have your alert just search for upcoming weekends or various months. Flexibility is the key to cheaper airfare so it’s great that Kayak alerts can search multiple dates for you at once. Let the website do the work for you!

Final Thoughts

Setting up Kayak alerts is easy. If you have your eye on certain travel dates, make sure you take advantage! For more robust airfare searches, Google Flights is probably where you want to go. More on that in the future.

Family Travel Hacking Guide Index

Introduction

Set a Travel Goal

Using and Tracking Frequent Flyer Programs

Who to Follow on Social Media

Saving Money on Cash Flights

How to find cheap airfare with airfarewatchdog

Finding cheap airfare with The Flight Deal

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.

1. Go to IFTTT.com. Sign up if you haven’t.
2. Click “create recipe” then click “This”
   

   

3. Click “Feed”, choose “New Feed Item”
4. Cut and paste the RSS feed URL you want to monitor, click “Create Trigger”
5. Click “That”
   

   

6. Find “E-mail”, fill in the subject and body for yourself.
7. 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.

Family Travel Hacking Guide Index

Introduction

Set a Travel Goal

Using and Tracking Frequent Flyer Programs

Who to Follow on Social Media

Saving Money on Cash Flights

How to find cheap airfare with airfarewatchdog

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

Family Travel Hacking Guide Index

Introduction

Set a Travel Goal

Using and Tracking Frequent Flyer Programs

Who to Follow on Social Media

Saving Money on Cash Flights

How to find cheap airfare with airfarewatchdog