Flight Price Drops After You Book? Get The Difference Back Automatically

Many years ago there were services that would track your itineraries and notify you when airfare prices dropped. This wasn’t very helpful because most tickets had hefty change fees. Prices didn’t usually drop more than $150 to make reticketing at the lower fare worthwhile. Since the pandemic, when United first moved to eliminate change fees and everyone else copied them, any fare drop is a windfall. You can just get a credit for the difference in price. Airfares are volatile, and for the past four years or so I’ve been claiming these changes manually. I’m a bit late to the party in automating it. Several services will do this now. Some of them charge a subscription fee, which may work for heavy travelers. Most readers are only going to want a ‘pay on success’ model because: Signing up for recurring charges, whether the service works or not, is an easy thing to forget and you wind up out more money than you save. And you may not buy enough paid tickets for it to matter, especially if you’re redeeming a lot of miles. (But a subscription service can be a better deal if you’re certain you’ll be saving over $500 per year.) So I’m giving pAIback a spin. They do not charge any fees until and less they save you money. pAIback automates post-purchase airfare repricing. You forward the confirmation, or connect your Gmail or Outlook and they say they only scan for itineraries — and they monitor your bookings. When a lower fare appears, it acts on the reservation so the airline issues the difference as a future travel credit. No enrollment or monthly fee. You pay 20% of each fare reduction secured. The airline deposits the entire credit into your airline account and pAIback charges your card for their fee (e.g. a $100 airline credit costs $20 cash) They work with itineraries booked directly with the airline, because they’d have to go through any online travel agency to rebook a third party reservation. They don’t work with basic economy because of the fees and restrictions on changing those. And they don’t work with award tickets. They also do not work with international itineraries that do not touch the United States (change rules on those can vary). Something I like about pAIback already is that the service doesn’t just notify you of price drops, it actually charts what happens to the price of your itinerary over time, showing it going up (or down). At this point they work with itineraries on American Airlines, United, Delta, and Alaska. That has me mostly covered. I would love Southwest Airlines. Southwest for decades has been the most aggressive fighting off any third party services like this (or in the old days, that would snipe check-in at exactly 24 hours to get the best boarding position). You can do this yourself. Many of you don’t, and for many of you it’s a better deal to pay someone else to do it for you (only if you actually save). pAiback is clear that it will never change the flight, seat or itinerary and that the same confirmation number remains. But I’m paranoid, so there’s one additional step I plan to take. I don’t usually see very last minute price drops – I buy a ticket several weeks out, and then it gets cheaper in the days prior to travel – but I’ll still probably click to stop tracking an itinerary after an upgrade clears. They aren’t supposed to be messing with this, but as I get comfortable with it I start off paranoid. (I also wouldn’t track something this way if I booked something with a companion using my status, getting them free extra legroom seats, and then wound up splitting the record for some reason.) Google Flights lets you set up price tracking for free but doesn’t do the rebooking. Autopilot is pricier but includes some award and upgrade support. JetBack has a $100 per year subscription and looks like it includes Southwest and JetBlue. I’ll let y’all know how pAIback does but it sems to have only upside. Topics on this page