The 10 best airfare alert and listing sites

updated 3:52 p.m. ET Sept. 25, 2007

By George Hobica - We all know that there are airfare search sites such as Expedia, Priceline, and Cheapair.com. But then there's a whole different animal: the airfare listing and alert site.

Sites in this latter category, which is growing at a rapid clip, may include a search component, but they also provide a list of low fares and/or alerts about such fares, either delivered by e-mail or posted online. They're ideal for people who are just looking for somewhere cheap to visit, or who are hoping to travel on specific routes but want to buy when fares are at their lowest. In alphabetical order, here are 10 of the best.

Airfarewatchdog.com: This is the only site in the group that lists and compares fares on Southwest Airlines (now the largest domestic carrier based on passengers boarded, but one that refuses to pay sites to send it traffic), as well as those on low cost carriers such as Allegiant and Skybus, which sell fares only on their own Web sites. Whereas the other sites listed here use computer programs to evaluate fares, Airfarewatchdog uses people, who actually test if seats are available at the fares listed (sometimes airlines file fares for which very few or no seats at all are available, which is very naughty of them).

However, Airfarewatchdog.com does not offer individual city pair alerts (although this is in the works); rather, if you sign up for alerts you'll get a list of fares from your chosen airports that the staff believes are unusually good deals. And the site doesn't monitor nearly as many routes and fares as some of the other sites on this list. Uniquely, however, each list of fares from a given airport also includes fares from nearby alternate airports on one page, and you can put your alerts on "vacation hold" for up to a year.

(Disclaimer: George Hobica, the author of this piece, writes for Airfarewatchdog.com.)

Bestfares.com: Earlier this year, Best Fares underwent a design change and now its fare listing area most nearly resembles Fare Compare (below) more than any other site. On the home page, you'll see a box that reads "Type your Departure City here" and a "go" button. You'll see a listing of fares to hundreds of airports from your city. These fares include some but not all taxes, and you'll also see "member only fares" listed along with "published" fares.

The member fares are typically specially negotiated fares — sometimes called "consolidator" fares — that are offered from time to time to various travel agents. You cannot book fares on Bestfares.com; rather you have to call a toll-free number to complete your purchase. But like Farecompare.com below, Bestfares.com provides a good barometer of where fares are at any given moment, and the fares are updated throughout the day.

Farecompare.com: This is the new breed of automated fare comparison and alert systems. You can sign up for as many individual city pair alerts as you like, and you can also choose to see only those fares that have hit their historical low point or that have gone down by a lesser amount. You can also see a list of all fares from the airport(s) of your choice, and you can specify either domestic or first class fares. The alert sign up procedure is very clear and easy to use. The "Getaway Map" lets you browse a map from your chosen airport showing the lowest fares to various domestic and Canadian destinations, and you can refresh the map based on the exact week that you'd like to travel. Fares are listed from lowest to highest.

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Farecompare gets its data from a company called ATPCO, which processes fares from the airline computer systems and delivers them to travel agencies and what are known in the industry as Global Distribution Systems (GDS's) such as Sabre, Galileo, and Apollo. Domestic fares are updated by ATPCO (and thus by Farecompare) three times a day during the week and once a day on weekends.

Farecast.com: This site is best known for predicting where an airfare on a particular route is going to go (up, down, or stay the same) over a period of time. But recently it, too, got into the fare listing game. From the home page, go to the "Airline Ticket Deals" section and you'll see a select, but not very extensive, list of fares from the airport of your choice. Unlike Farecompare, Farecast uses airfare data from Cambridge, MA-based ITA Software, which in our experience is more accurate than ATPCO's data. Farecast's fares show all taxes up front, but Southwest, Allegiant, Skybus and a few other airlines' fares are not shown.

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