A flight deal is a fare priced at least 25% below the 90-day rolling average for that route and cabin. Our AI scans 1,000+ airlines every 15 minutes, cross-references against historical price data going back five years, and surfaces only the fares that are statistically anomalous. About 1 in 400 fares qualifies; the rest is regular pricing dressed up as a "sale".
Search flights now →Most flight deal sites publish anything that is cheaper than the airlines list price, which is a meaningless benchmark since airlines rarely sell at list. A real deal is judged against the 25th percentile of what travelers actually paid for that route in the past 90 days. By that measure: a $400 New York to London nonstop is not a deal (the median is $420). A $280 New York to London nonstop in October is a deal (4 standard deviations below the rolling median). The Valor AI uses the second definition.
The AI runs three jobs in parallel. The first watches for mistake fares, which are airline pricing errors that get fixed within 6 to 24 hours; getting to them in the first hour is worth $200-800 per ticket. The second watches for fare-class downgrades, where an airline reopens cheaper inventory it had hidden, usually 21-45 days before departure. The third watches for codeshare arbitrage, where the same physical flight is sold at different prices under different airline codes (a Lufthansa-operated United-marketed flight can be 30% cheaper on the United side). Humans cannot scan fast enough to catch any of these in time. The AI catches roughly 800 deals per day worldwide; we surface the 20-30 most useful ones for our audience.
A mistake fare is a published price below the airlines actual cost (e.g., a $190 business class New York to Singapore). They happen when an airline misconfigures a fare class, applies a wrong currency conversion, or leaves a promotional code active past its end date. The safe-booking rules: book within the first hour the fare is visible, wait 48 hours before booking any non-refundable add-ons (hotel, ground transfer), do not call the airline to confirm (calls flag the booking for fraud review), and assume the airline will honor it (US Department of Transportation rules require honoring published mistake fares booked in good faith). Of the ~50 mistake fares per month worldwide, about 85% get honored.
We pull from the same fare data feeds the airlines and large OTAs use (GDS feeds: Amadeus, Sabre, Travelport) plus direct ATPCO fare filings. No screen scraping. When a deal appears, the AI verifies it on the airline website itself within 60 seconds; if it cannot be booked from the airline directly, it is dropped before reaching this page. About 12% of "deals" get dropped at this verification step.
Google Flights compares to the same routes recent history. We compare against the 25th-percentile of actual paid fares for the same route, season, and cabin, going back five years. Google labels routine sales as deals; we only surface statistical anomalies.
Median lifetime is 4 hours. The fastest one we have seen on record died in 22 minutes; the longest survived 38 hours. Mobile push alerts ship within 90 seconds of the AI verifying the fare.
No. The deals listed here are public and free. Email alerts are also free; mobile push alerts are part of a $9/month optional plan we are launching later this year.
Airline inventory is finite. A deal labelled "10 seats left" can be gone in seconds if multiple users book at once. The deals page refreshes every 15 minutes; what is visible is real at that moment but not guaranteed.
Updated 2026-05-20 by Valor Flights. Run a free flight search →