How do you find those super cheap flights?

If you’ve worked your way around the Internets, you may have read something about airfare being the cheapest on Tuesdays at some arbitrary time in the afternoon.

This is false. 

The cheapest time to buy an airline ticket is whenever fancy metrics, anticipated demand, time to departure, and market conditions (e.g., whatever a competitor’s charging) suggest that it would be best to lower fare prices.

But sometimes, prices are entered manually by human hand. So I guess the real cheapest time to buy a ticket is when this human screws up and drops a zero or something – which can produce some fantastically rock-bottom prices.

When chasing these ultra-low fares, speed is key. The so-called “Delta glitch” above lasted just under 2 hours on some random December morning back in 2013.

Not surprisingly, the better the fare deal, the shorter the deal will last. This is especially true if the deal is a genuine mistake fare, which can cost an airline millions of dollars in lost revenue. So chances are, if you find out about a low fare through a friend’s “Who wants to come with to [exotic destination] this weekend?!” Facebook post, you’ve already missed out.

But you don’t have to constantly crawl forums and blogs to find these deals. In fact, anyone can be one of the first to know about the next great low-fare bonanza through a simple two-step process: 

1. Select a source feed.

2. Receive fare alerts on IFTTT.com. 

If you want to skip the step-by-step tutorial, you can just add yourself to a few generic alerts.

This probably goes without saying, but if you’re looking to travel to a specific location on specific dates, these resources aren’t for you. Instead, you should check out the price alert tools at AirfareWatchdog and Kayak. This low-fare business is rather unpredictable, and there’s no guarantee you’ll ever get a great deal to a predetermined destination, especially within a tight timeframe.

But if you’re down for an adventure, to wherever the lowest fare may take you, read on.

Step One: Select a source feed

To start, you’ll need to find the RSS Feed of your preferred source – or sources. In my humble opinion, the best sources are:

The Flight Deal

The Flight Deal is my go-to resource for finding the best fares out of most major (i.e. international gateway) cities in the United States:

Check out these amazing deals when you click on New York City under Flight Deals:

Sure, you could subscribe to their newsletters (and probably should), but that won’t give you the targeted and real-time results that are crucial to booking the lowest fares.

You could also follow them on Twitter (and probably should), but their updates might get lost in the slew of tweets you scroll through every hour. And setting up text alerts for every single tweet, though very mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive, will get old pretty fast – especially as you get drowned in fares out of cities sadly distant from where you live.

So take note of the RSS Feed URL of your preferred origin city. You can create this by attaching “/feed” to the end of the URL of whatever RSS-enabled page you’re viewing. For example, if you want to get alerts for flights out of Los Angeles, your RSS feed would be:

http://www.theflightdeal.com/category/flight-deals/lax/feed/

If you live in Arizona, your RSS feed would probably be:

http://www.theflightdeal.com/category/flight-deals/phoenix/feed/

And so on. You can view a full list of available feeds at the end of this post.

If you live outside these cities, you should also check out:

The Fare Deal Alert

Created by the same people who run The Flight Deal, The Fare Deal Alert covers major U.S. gateway cities not mentioned above. Also, is the name pun-intended? If so, bravo.

Anyways, create your RSS feed URL as instructed above (or scroll to the bottom of this post). If you live outside the cities listed, you may need to take a positioning flight to a larger airport for the lowest fares. A positioning flight is what it sounds like: a flight from your home airport to one of the major international gateway cities above.

You can also filter the “all cities” results, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention one more source first:

Flyertalk – Mileage Run Deals

If The Flight Deal and The Fare Deal Alert don’t offer enough data power for you, check out the grand-daddy of frequent-flyer communities that started it all:

This is the mileage run forum on FlyerTalk.

A mileage run is a flight taken for the sole purpose of accruing airline miles or elite program status. As you can imagine, these trips are for more hardcore frequent fliers, as reflected by the number of intimidatingly-unfamiliar IATA codes and other strange-sounding acronyms on this forum.

Mileage runs, by definition, have a relatively low cost per mile (CPM). Otherwise, they’d just be hell-in-the-air-and-back flights. Given this cost consideration, most mileage runs also happen to be great fare deals.

But I’d bet 99.9% of the best mileage runs on FlyerTalk and posts on The Flight Deal and The Fare Deal Alert get cross-listed within hours of one other. In other words, anything you find on Flyertalk will probably get posted on at least one of these two sites fairly quickly – and vice versa.

But if you’d like to delve into the world of expert flying, take note of the RSS feed URL below:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/external.php?type=rss2&forumids=372

There are, of course, many other fare-info sources available out there. In fact, you’re only limited by the number of blogs, media sources, and other RSS-distributors in the universe, which I imagine to be quite a lot.

But first, let’s find out what we need to do with these mysterious RSS feed URLs.

STEP TWO: Receive fare alerts VIA IFTTT

Once you have your preferred RSS feeds handy, you’ll need to log-in to IFTTT to start receiving fare alerts.

I don’t know about you, but I found all this incredibly exciting. Being able to import qualifying data and take a specified action based on that data is a basic, but incredibly powerful tool.

Here’s how to make it work for your next adventure:

1. Start by clicking on Create a Recipe to make a new if-this-then-that statement (that’s how the site gets its name).

2. You should have at least one RSS feed URL handy from the previous step, so you can select “Feed” as the this input.

3. After you click your input method, you’ll be asked to Choose a trigger.

This is where things get fun.

If you choose new feed item, you’ll get every single post or topic that pops up on your selected RSS feed. So if you just want a steady stream of The Flight Deal posts with low fares out of New York City, you’d click new feed item and enter the nyc RSS URL in the next screen:

If you’d rather narrow your search with keywords, you’d click New feed item matches to only pull RSS feed results that contain your search terms.

This would especially be useful if you only wanted to search fares involving one city in, let’s say, FlyerTalk’s mileage run forum. So to get results about New York fares using the Flyertalk RSS feed, you might fill the trigger fields like so:

Unfortunately, IFTTT does not support boolean search operators (OR, AND, “”, NOT), which means you’d probably have to add multiple “recipes” with all of the NYC-area airports (JFK, LGA, EWR) as keywords to get the best results.

But some people might appreciate the added flexibility offered by the wealth of potential data inputs on discussion forums. For example, you could search for airline codes, service class, fare buckets, reputable users, or the “mistake fare” string, to name a few.

4. Once you’ve got the Feed URL and Keyword (if any) fields filled out out, click Create your trigger to select how you’d like to receive alerts:

Click that to see the shocking number of notification options you have at your fingertips:

And that’s just about a third of all the communication platforms supported. My initial gut reaction was to wonder whether this was, in fact, too many options, but the patriot in me quickly shut down that shamefully un-American thought.

I check my email fairly often, so real-time email or email digest updates work best for me. If you’re itching for a last-minute escape as soon as your schedule-driven sanity will last, you might elect to receive texts via SMS. The possibilities are (practically) endless.

5. The next few steps will vary based on which notification method you choose, but should be intuitive and fairly straightforward. When in doubt, go default.

Here’s what an IFTTT email notification looks like:

I should note that IFTTT searches for new data every 15 minutes or so, depending on which input option you select:

I’m also assuming that server issues, RSS refresh lag, and other technological mishaps might affect trigger times – so IFTTT, like all things technology, shouldn’t be relied upon as 100% foolproof. That’s why you should also subscribe with each RSS source directly.

But while the trigger times aren’t instantaneous, IFTTT sure beats checking a blog or RSS reader every half hour. 

It’s that simple. Now you can get low fare alerts from the airport of your choosing – whenever and however you like. You can subscribe to a few generic (no keyword) alerts here. Where applicable, please consider supporting the feed’s content source by booking reservations through their affiliates.

Some Concluding Thoughts

By now, I hope you understand why I totally geeked out when I discovered IFTTT. The deceptively simple if-then statement is an incredibly powerful tool to get the results you want.

When you think of all the potential combinations of input methods (including sources not mentioned here!), notification options, and search keywords – the possibilities are quite literally limitless.

For example, here’s a small sampling of how you could tinker around with IFTTT’s various functions:

• You could choose a Twitter feed as the input and add keywords to get select tweets texted to your phone.
• You could take FlyerTalk’s RSS feed and search airline IATA codes (e.g., “AA” for American Airlines) to find the flights you need to qualify for elite status. 
• You could take The Flight Deal’s RSS feed and search for first (F) or business (J) fares to take your next trip in style. 
• And many, many more.

Be sure to share what and how you search in the comments below! The frequent flyer community, including everyone from first-time flyers to mileage-running road warriors, eagerly awaits to hear about what you find.

RSS CATEGORY Feed INDEX

The Flight Deal

TheFlightDeal RSS feeds by origin city: 

http://www.theflightdeal.com/category/flight-deals/origin/feed/

/* Replace "origin" with the desired origin city code: 

NEW YORK CITY = nyc 
SAN FRANCISCO = sfo
LOS ANGELES = lax
BOSTON = boston-flight-deals
CHICAGO = chicago
DALLAS = dallas
MIAMI = miami
PHILADELPHIA = philadelphia
PHOENIX = phoenix
PORTLAND = portland
SEATTLE = seattle-flight-deals
WASHINGTON D.C. = dc
OTHER CITIES = other-cities

TheFlightDeal RSS feed for ALL origin CITIES ABOVE: 

http://theflightdeal.com/category/flight-deals/feed

The Fare Deal Alert

TheFareDealAlert RSS feeds by origin city: 

http://faredealalert.com/category/fare-deals/origin/feed/

/* Replace "origin" with the desired origin city code: 

ATLANTA = atl 
CHARLOTTE = clt
DENVER = den
DETROIT = dtw
HOUSTON = iah
KANSAS CITY = mci
LAS VEGAS = las
MINNEAPOLIS = msp
ORLANDO = mco
SAN DIEGO = san

TheFareDealAlert RSS feed for ALL origin CITIES ABOVE: 

http://faredealalert.com/category/fare-deals/feed

Flyertalk

FlyerTalk RSS feeds by forum_num:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/external.php?type=rss2&forumids=forum_num

/* Find "forum_num" in the page url of selected forum. 
/* For example, if Mileage Run Deals forum is selected, 
/** forum_num can be found in this URL: 

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/mileage-run-deals-372/

/* In the above case, 372 = forum_num of Mileage Run Deals forum

Other Feeds

ThePointsGuy "Amazing Deal Alerts" RSS feed: 
http://thepointsguy.com/category/amazing-deal-alerts/feed

FlyerTalk "Mileage Run Deals" Twitter feed: 
Tweets by FTMileageRuns

TheFlightDeal Twitter feed: 
Tweets by TheFlightDeal

SecretFlying Twitter feed: 
Tweets by SecretFlying

/* Feel free to suggest others!