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Comment by rubyrescue | Hacker News Reader

I've flown from SEA-NYC for $1.86. I flew from YYV to Romania, and onto Turkey, for $200. I flew with my family of 5 in first class from SEA-YTO (Toronto) for $0, on Air Canada. Too many others to count. All from flyertalk. It's not as good as it used to be but there were times I've taken whole flights full of flyertalkers headed somewhere basically for free.

Key to success: Find some friends who also like to do this and who will wake you up in the middle of the night if they find a great deal (and won't complain if you reciprocate). It's hard to watch flyertalk all the time and the deals go quickly.

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I actually just started a service to do just that. For $8/m, I'll email/text people when the craziest deals drop. It's temoprarily sitting at amazingairfare.zaccohn.com, if you're interested.

I don't know I'd be willing to pay $8/mo for a service where I don't know if the notifications will be timely enough or of actually good deals. But I would happily pay 10-15% of the ticket price as a finder's fee for any deal that turns out awesome. (Kind of like the recruiter / employee referral model, where the company pays 15-30% of the starting salary as a fee.)

Hard to enforce, though, so you'd most likely have to go on the honor system.

Why not give it the "Magic" treatment? Provider broadcasts emails / text messages. You can respond with some simple code, like "YES" or "BUY". Provider will then attempt to purchase at that rate using stored information. I would think the service fee would be best as a percentage with a minimum.

That's tough because purchasing is often difficult. It took me dozens of tries to get a flight booked to Cypress once, through 4 cities. I ended up deciding the onerous itinerary was not worth the nearly free ticket. That's common so you don't necessarily want to insert yourself into these transactions for people, it really wouldn't scale.

It's not just that it wouldn't scale - it wouldn't work even if I only had a dozen subscribers!

$96 a year. I seem to be sending out 2-3 deals a month, sometimes more. If you book ONE deal (out of 24-36+), and save $400 off average price... it's worth it.

If you don't think that's worth it - then you probably don't fall into the customer segment this is targeted toward. :)

Also, the "finders fee" model requires a ton more work. Integrating with all the 3rd party ticketing sites (kayak, orbitz, priceline), and ALL the first party ones (delta, united... etihad... cebu air... aeroflot... etc etc etc). Considering this is a side project, that quickly becomes prohibitive.

I am probably exactly your target market. But I'm also very particular about the way I fly and optimize for status. The variables in my case are that I'm only really interested in UA flights out of SFO. The likelyhood of a deal like that even showing up at all on the service is very low; which is why I probably won't get anything for my $96.

That said, if something did show up; I would gladly pay that $96, or more, in an instant.

Just a data point.

I'm more focused on people who are more interested in going somewhere awesome for not a lot of money than what airline they're flying.

I appreciate the data point, and honestly targeting people like you is probably a larger/more lucrative market. But that would require a lot more building and systems integration, and as this is just a side project, I'm not planning to expand to serve that need. Definitely appreciate the feedback though.

I'd sign up, but I'm in Edinburgh, Scotland. I guess that you only offer US-based deals?

I'm focused on that now, yeah. But even though I can't help you right now... here's a whole section of a site focused on European deals: http://www.secretflying.com/euro-deals/

Keep an eye out there. :) Lots of good stuff coming out of Dublin lately. Shouldn't be too far from you.

One problem with the % cut model is if your service is really good (and finds those $1.86 flight deals), then you get a pittance. Maybe a flat $8 for each deal?

Just curious did you actually want to fly to new york? Or was it a case of "wow it is only 1.86 to go to nyc, i guess i am going".

nah, you have to be up for random trips or have a list of places that you would be willing to go if free. It's much less likely that one will pop up conveniently for a trip you need to make any time soon.

Totally not need-based. A buddy and I just bought them and we decided to just make a weekend of it, went to a few good restaurants, saw a show.

I have a similar track record to you from Flyertalk. As I also mentioned below, I also check http://www.pointsbuzz.com for any breaking opportunities.

Out of curiosity, were those free with or without taxes/fees?

One of my friends about 12 years ago found round trip tickets from NYC to Egypt for $0 + taxes and fees. Fees came to about $100-$200 or so. He immediately bought 10 tickets for himself and friends. So an amazing deal, but still not free when considering taxes and fees.

Those were all-in. The $0 Air Canada one they actually called me and said that technically there was no contract of carriage because there was no money exchanged, but they let me have it anyway. And actually I remember now, it was $200 to Romania, and we ended up paying $230 more to get to turkey on a standard ticket. The Bucharest ticket was surely supposed to be $2000.

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