How to Use Flight Price Alerts to Save Money on Your Next Trip

This simple tip can help you score the best flight price for your next vacation.

These days, everyone is looking for the best flight deals. But with prices fluctuating so frequently, how do you know when to book to get the best price? One helpful way to ensure you're getting a good deal is to sign up for flight price alerts, a free service offered by several travel companies.

"You can think of price alerts as your personal travel deal scout, helping you save time and money by tracking prices daily and alerting you in real-time when the price changes for a flight, hotel, or rental car you want," Kayla Inserra, Kayak’s consumer travel trends expert, tells Travel + Leisure. Kayak was one of the first travel companies to set up a price alert tool in 2006.

Here's everything you need to know about flight price alerts, from how to set them up to the best sites to use.

Related: The Best Time to Book a Flight for Domestic, International, and Summer Travel

How do flight price alerts work?

When you set a price alert with a certain company, that company will monitor flight prices for your specifications, including departure and arrival airports, dates, and airlines, and notify you when it’s the best time to book. Some services even allow you to set price alerts for broad parameters if you're particularly flexible with your travel plans, such as price alerts for an entire month or any destination in the world. Or you can be hyper-specific, selecting a particular flight for your price alerts. No matter what you set your specifications to, you'll receive a notification if the price changes for matching flights.

How to Set Up Flight Price Alerts

There are many ways to set price alerts, but you'll always have to select at least a few parameters, which could include origin, destination, and dates. Depending on the service you use, you'll likely be able to create an alert that suits your specific needs. For instance, if you are eyeing one specific flight, you can enter those flight numbers and track the price of that flight. But if you don't have a particular travel date in mind, you can select a date range, and the service will search for the best deals to your destination within that range.

"Flexibility is the best way to get the lowest airfares," Laura Lindsay, Skyscanner’s global travel trends expert, tells T+L. "To snag the best deal, set up price alerts for other airports close to your chosen locations and try different dates. This way, you’ll get notified if there are even better deals on alternate routes. You can also set multiple price alerts to keep your options wide open.

And here's another hack: You can set price alerts for flights you've already booked. If the price drops, you might be able to change your flight with your airline and receive the difference in the form of an e-credit. Just remember that e-credits do have expiration dates, so this hack only works if you plan on flying with your airline again within the next year or so.

Related: 10 Tips to Help You Score Cheap Last-minute Flights

The Best Flight Price Alert Services

Kayak

Kayak is a metasearch engine that scours multiple sites for the best deals in travel, from airfare to hotels to car rentals. The most common way to set up a flight price alert is to search for flights on the site or in the app — inputting your origin, destination, and dates as you normally would — and set up a price alert for that search to find the best deal.

But that's not the only way to use Kayak's price alerts. "If you know exactly where you want to go but are not sure when, you can set up a flexible price alert to snag a low price to your destination," says Inserra. "As you create a new alert, select 'Flexible Dates' in the top navigation and enter your departure and arrival airports. You can make your travel dates anytime, upcoming weekends, or the month you’d like to travel. You’ll receive notifications for that route with whatever is the lowest price during the time period you selected."

And if your destination doesn't matter, you can even set up a price alert for the 25 most popular cities on Kayak, from London to Miami.

Skyscanner

Skyscanner is another travel metasearch engine. As with Kayak, you can search for flights to and from specific destinations on specific dates, then set a price alert for that search. But you can also take advantage of Skyscanner's "everywhere" function to search all destinations in the world, either on specific dates or for an entire month. "If you want to get even more intel on when to book, check out the Savings Generator tool to understand the best time to book and the potential savings available for the most popular destinations for U.S. travelers," says Lindsay.

Google Flights

Google Flights is an easy-to-use flight metasearch engine that allows you to track prices for your searches. Once you input your search parameters, you can click "track prices" to receive alerts if those prices change. You can also see the price history for your flights, and Google Flights will let you know whether the current prices are average, high, or low for that route.

Momondo

Metasearch engine Momondo might not have as much brand recognition as some of its competitors — at least in the U.S. — but it's a powerful tool for searching for flights. To set a price alert, search your origin, destination, and date, then toggle on price alerts for that search. Momondo also lets you know its predictions about whether or not it's a good time to book. You can click on "flight insights" for a detailed report about the best times to fly to your destination, including the cheapest months, cheapest days of the week, and cheapest airlines to fly.

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