Do you ever wonder if you’ve gotten the best price on your flight? Ever book a flight and discover it became $50 or even hundreds of dollars cheaper?
If you’re one of those people that books a flight and simply moves on with your life to more important things, I envy you. My obsessively optimizing brain doesn’t let me off the hook so easily – though at least I’ve gotten better at not criticizing myself that I “should have known!”
Why even bother checking if the price drops? Because, unless you’re in basic economy, you can generally harvest price drops in the form of airline credits to use on future trips.
It used to be that you had to manually re-search your flight if you wanted to check for a price drop, which was tedious and a shot in the dark (“Did the price drop now? What about now? How about now?”)
Here’s how to be clever without embodying an OCD-like approach: Create an alert in Google Flights. Google Flights is an excellent and comprehensive tool for finding and booking flights, especially now that they started showing Southwest’s flight prices.
You can create alerts for either a general itinerary (“Round trip from Austin to Seattle on such and such dates”) or a specific flight (“Southwest flight 1234 from Denver to Santa Barbara on 8/20”). Now, you’ll get email if the flight price changes.
Most people probably use these alerts, if they use them at all, to watch the price on a trip they haven’t booked yet. I create them after I book.
Usually price changes are increases, especially close-in. Delete the email. But if it’s a decrease, I spring into action.
Some airlines make rebooking easier than others. Southwest is particularly easy. You pull up your reservation, click change flight, select your original flight, and it immediately offers a credit. Thirty seconds, start to finish.
Delta and American are a little more tedious. You can change flights, but the system annoyingly won’t let you pick your current flight. I deal with this with a little “two-step”: change the flight to something else and then change again back to what you want. Or cancel and rebook. So in this case, it takes a few minutes.
I haven’t flown the other major US carriers much lately. I imagine it’s a similar story across the board. Let me know if you have an experience you’d like to share.
I book a lot of award tickets, and I’ll still watch the cash price on the assumption that the award price will generally follow. On some airlines, like Southwest, award prices are directly correlated to cash prices, so this works perfectly. On other airlines, they aren’t necessarily correlated, but a price drop makes it worth re-checking the award pricing.
Is it worth it? That’s up to you. I’ve reclaimed over $1,000 so far this year in price drops across seven or so different tickets. For me, the dubious part of the bargain was the guess-and-check revisiting, re-searching game you had to play just to see if there was a drop. Now that this part can be automated, rebooking is easily worth the effort.
Hope this helps!