Originally Posted by cordelli

There have been attempts at notifications, but they have never worked very well. You could try facebook and twitter for sites like airfare watchdog and farecompare, they send out alerts.

There was a time not that long ago when somebody would post a fare and it would not be picked up by the other sites for hours, way before google was indexing posts here in minutes. Be it posted here or over at slick deals, fat wallet, the ones above, etc, it would take a while for many people to start booking it. Now once it's posted someplace, it's usually cross posted within minutes to all the other sites now, usually multiple times, because everybody wants to be the first to share it.

Sad to say, sometimes deals are shared privately for a while so as to not ruin it by having the world go after it all at once.

Those days are gone, and now within minutes of being posted on one of those sites, it's on all the others. Deals reach critical mass much quicker, dopes start calling the airline in minutes asking if they can upgrade their fifty seven cent fare to first class, and the media picks up on the deals in no time. The American Deal to Spain for example that was a few weeks ago would probably have lasted a day or more before they knew about it and pulled it. Now they knew about it pretty quick, fixed it, and had the surcharges back on the tickets at the next update in a few hours.