There is a quiet corner of the travel economy where people earn an income — or at minimum significant travel savings — by finding cheap flights before anyone else does. Flight deal curators post 5–10 discounted fares daily on Patreon pages, newsletters, and social media channels. Subscribers pay $10–30 a month for early access. The best operators, like Going (formerly Scott's Cheap Flights), Secret Flying, and Dollar Flight Club, collectively reach millions of subscribers.
A thread on r/Shoestring asked the obvious question: how do they actually do it? The answer is less mystical than it appears, and the tools involved are largely accessible to anyone willing to invest time.
The Core Tool: Fare Alert Systems
The foundation of professional deal-hunting is a matrix of fare alert tools that monitor prices across airlines and routes continuously. Google Flights is the most accessible — its price tracking feature sends alerts when fares on specific routes drop, and its flexible date calendar allows rapid scanning of a route across a month to identify anomalous low prices.
For more sophisticated monitoring, professional deal hunters rely on tools like Skyscanner's price alert system, Airfarewatchdog, and — for those who want to go deep — ITA Matrix, a flight search tool originally built for travel agents that Google acquired and maintains. ITA Matrix does not book flights but shows the actual underlying fare data airlines publish, without the markup or algorithm influence of consumer-facing platforms.
What a Mistake Fare Is and Why It Matters
Some of the most dramatic deals in flight deal history are mistake fares: pricing errors created when airlines miscommunicate between their reservation system and distribution platforms, or when a human error inserts a wrong digit into a fare. A business class ticket to Tokyo for $400, a return to Europe for $150 — these are real deals that have occurred and been honored (sometimes reluctantly) by airlines.
Mistake fares disappear within hours, sometimes minutes. The deal hunters who catch them are monitoring price dashboards with push notifications or have bots set to alert them when a specific route drops below a threshold price. Speed is the entire competitive advantage.
Positioning Flights: The Expert's Secret
A less discussed but highly effective tool is the positioning flight. Rather than flying direct from your home airport (which may have limited sale routes), experienced fare hunters identify a cheap flight to a hub — London Heathrow, Amsterdam, Dubai, Doha — from which a genuinely cheap onward flight departs. The combined cost of positioning flight plus discounted onward leg often beats any direct route from the home airport.
Can Regular Travelers Replicate This?
Partially, and with realistic expectations. Setting up Google Flights alerts for your five most desired destinations costs nothing and catches a meaningful percentage of mainstream sales. Adding Airfarewatchdog and Skyscanner alerts extends coverage further. Checking Going's free newsletter tier provides curated deals without the time investment of active monitoring.
The gap between a casual deal-alert user and a professional curator is the hours invested daily in active monitoring, the breadth of routes being watched simultaneously, and — most critically — the network connections within the airline industry that sometimes provide advance notice of promotions before they hit public platforms.
For most travelers, the realistic goal is not matching a professional curator's output but being in the alert ecosystem when a deal on a route you actually want appears. Set the alerts, check them consistently, and be ready to book fast — mistake fares and limited-seat sales do not wait for you to clear your schedule.
