Juanefny

I just got a tripit pro membership. Any tips on how to get the most out of it? I figured it could be particularly helpful for southwest tickets since you can change them. Any other benefits you like?

InkUnderNails

I cancelled my Pro subscription when my travel slowed significantly. Trip-it is really good as a backup to the somewhat iffy WN App. I would get notifications of delays and gate changes, plus the time to get to the next flight was helpful.

If you are hoping that it will tell you about price reductions so you can rebook, it won't. It will continuously tell you WGA is available when you have a BS or AT ticket. This is not bad. Often, I would have bought BS in the last seven days and WGA would open up inside T24. This could save significant $$$. If you want the BS it is a nuisance.

If I was still flying 100+ segments a year, I would still have it. As hotels and other travel providers stepped up their notifications, it had less value.

Juanefny

But I have read here it does tell you when fares go down?

InkUnderNails

It might or might not. My experience was that it did not for several reasons. Most important was that my travel was usually for a particular day and I would book a specific itinerary. Trip-It only scans for changes in that exact itinerary. Often the big savings are found by switching to a different time or even day. It does not look for these. If you are flying HOU-DAL there are many flights many less than an hour apart. Trip-it will not tell you about those other flights.

I would typically book two months out which I found was the sweet spot for fares. It was not close enough to travel day to be into full flights but it was far enough from schedule opening for the yields manager to have kicked in.

It also does not automatically re-book. You still have to go to southwest.com and do the change. On more than one occasion I found that the new fare did not exist when I tried to rebook.

It does work on occasion and if you fly a lot it will more than cover the extra fee. It will not catch anywhere near all of the the potential changes from which you could benefit.

TravelerMSY

I rarely get actionable fare alerts from tripit on Southwest but it's mostly because...

I almost exclusive book using points, so I have to manually enter an equivalent dollar value into TripIt, else it will value it at $5.60 or $11.20. And I sometimes forget.

I'm almost always booking opportunitistic deep sale fares or carrier matching sales, and their normal sales rarely trigger a reprice based on what I've got already. I rarely pay up for tickets or ever travel on Fri/Sun.

Also, tripit doesn't do the fare scan very far into the future. I end up just doing it manually when I see a good fare.

And, as the other guys mentioned, it only checks for the exact flights. No alternate flights or other carriers same-day.

Despite my criticisms, it is a good product. It only has to hit once to pay for itself.

TravelerMSY

On the other hand it is kind of useful to quickly go through and look to see how much it might cost to cancel and rebook all of your existing reservations. For the current A-list challenge and points promo.