AirFare-Hawks, How do you do it?
 

I always seem to miss the boat on those crazy fares that seem to come about once a year. There are certain "Fare-Hawks" who get in early on these deals and book multiple flights, while I always seem to miss the boat.

Is there a way some on this board can show some of the ways that they get notified of such occurences.

I tried downloading American Airlines software but am having a hard time getting it tow work. What are some of your techniques flyertalkers use to be notified of such fares, notifications by SMS, emails, software, RSS feeds? (If you don't mind sharing, of course)

The best resource for this is the Mileage Run forum on this very site.

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.

It seems like the glory days of those amazing fares are a thing of the past.

Not at all, you just need to accept they will come and go much much quicker (usually hours) and you can not take any time if you want to go or not, you have to be ready to react.

There have been two very good ones in the past few weeks

The expedia $300 off one
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/milea...new-terms.html

And the American Airlines one
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/milea...-cdg-sale.html

They come and they go still but they tend to go much faster than they have in the past.

In a few hrs, I'm flying RT MSN-ORD-LAS for $10.37

The Expedia deal lasted for what seemed like FOREVER. The AA deal was much quicker (think an hour or two on AA, then a bit longer on consolidators). The moral of the story is, buy now, ask questions later and I'm happy to say I got in on both of these!

There's an RSS feed for the Flyertalk Mileage Run forum:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/exter...2&forumids=372

Simple:

-Check FT at least 20x/day.

-Be ready to pull the trigger when you see a deal.

I have this down to a routine:
1) Have MR Deals as my homepage. Anytime I need to go on the net, I will see what's going on

2) Check every few hours; including via my smartphone

3) Have a calendar already planned with up to 1 year in advance the days that I think I can go (usually means I input holidays on there so I can target specific long weekends that a fare is available for)

4) Book first, ask questions later

I'd recommend subscribing to the forum for updates but the email alerts don't come in fast enough to catch certain fares.

or in my case, I have my own script that checks the forums(not just FT, other private travel forums), plus blogs, etc.. and sends me a text message, that way I always jnow whats going on, hence have been able to get in on every single deal that has been going on, plus on some that were mentioned but quickly closed by mods, and still alive...

Highly recommended.. : )

Hmmm, interesting, i'll have to add some sort of notifications to my iphone anytime a hot new thread pops up in mileage runs.