Originally Posted by
ftnoob
Had flights (on AA) booked back in October for Mrs. ftnoob to take this month (May); requested fare alerts from Google Travel and received not a one. Manual checking, however, turned up multiple fare drops. YMMV, of course.
(Hmmm, noticed today no AA flights on a kayak.com fare search; maybe AA also dropped out of Google Travel pricing?)
Sorry to take this thread out of Southwest realm and into Google Flight Alerts (GFA). Do you have any insights on how GFAs work on the back end? Specifically, does Google monitor fares at some predetermined intervals/times? Or is there some sort of signaling mechanism that systems like Google Flights register on and get notified instead of "polling" continuously? And are prices refreshed when you actually open the webpage for monitored flights or do they show the last cached stale prices? (I could not decipher the behavior as my flights have held steady fares lately)
More insight on how it works internally should help me in using it more effectively.