How to track flight prices without dates

You know where you want to go. You do not know when.

Every price alert you can set will ask you for dates anyway. That is not an oversight in any one product, it is what an alert is underneath: a saved search, and a search needs dates. So “tell me when flights to Lisbon get cheap” has to become “tell me when flights to Lisbon on the 14th to the 22nd of March get cheap” before anything will accept it, and the trip you have not planned falls straight out of the system at that step.

The short version: no free tool will watch a route across a window you define. To do this properly you need something that takes a route, a trip length, and a span of months as its input, and then keeps watching without you. That is a route watcher, and it is what Flydar is.

Here is why every other option fails the same test.

Nothing in the category is built for this

Four kinds of tool, four versions of the same gap. If you want the categories laid out on their own terms rather than against this one question, start here.

Per-search alerts are the free ones: Google Flights, Kayak, Skyscanner. You search, you toggle tracking, you get told when that search changes. They are precise and they work, and they are welded to the dates you entered. When those dates pass, the alert stops meaning anything and nothing announces it.

Google gets closest. Its “Any dates” option widens tracking past the exact dates you searched. But you do not get to choose the window. There is no control that says “watch March through June.” You start from a dated search, toggle the flexibility afterwards, and Google decides how far around your dates to look. “Any dates” describes what Google is willing to consider, not a range you specified. If your thinking is “sometime next year,” you still cannot express it.

Curated deal lists are the paid ones everyone has heard of: Going, Thrifty Traveler, Dollar Flight Club. They solve the opposite problem. They assume you are flexible about where and will take a great fare to somewhere you had not considered. You are not choosing routes, you are receiving finds, so if you know exactly where you want to go you are waiting for your route to appear in someone else’s newsletter, and it may never.

Two further limits bite here. They depart from a fixed list of supported airports, weighted heavily toward major hubs, and that is structural rather than something a tier upgrade fixes: if your airport is not on the list, no amount of subscription money puts it there. They are also the expensive end of this market, with paid tiers running from roughly $49 to about $199 a year (the full breakdown). So the trade is hub-shaped discovery, at discovery prices, from a service that cannot watch the route you asked about.

Price predictors tell you whether to wait or book on a specific itinerary. That is a question about dates you already have. It is not this question.

Target-price alerts ask you for a number instead of a date, which sounds like progress until you try to pick the number. Choosing it well means knowing what the route normally costs across the whole window, which is the research the alert was supposed to save you.

Free alerts assume you are fixed about when. Curated lists assume you are flexible about where. The traveller who knows the destination and not the month is served by neither.

The workarounds, and why they collapse

Everyone in this position invents one of three, and they fail in the same way.

The ladder. One alert per month across the window you might travel in. Six months, six alerts, coverage achieved. Then the arithmetic arrives: six alerts on one trip produce six times the email, all about the same journey, and each one dies as its dates pass. Three months in, half of them are watching a window that has already gone by. That is not a watched route. That is thirty saved searches with an expiry date.

The sweep. Skip alerts and run the flexible-date calendar by hand every couple of weeks. The technique is worth knowing, and it is the same one in how to tell if a flight price is good. It has one flaw and the flaw is fatal. The calendar shows about a month at a time, so surveying a season is several passes, repeated on a schedule, for as long as the trip stays hypothetical. Nobody sustains that for eight months. The drop lands on a Tuesday afternoon in month five, while you are at work, and you find out never.

The placeholder. Pick arbitrary dates purely to have something to track. This half works, which is what makes it dangerous. A single date pair moves for reasons that have nothing to do with the route being cheap, mostly seat counts emptying in one fare bucket on two particular flights. You get a signal that fires on noise and stays silent when a different week in the same month goes soft.

All three convert the thing you do not know, the dates, into a guess, and then watch the guess.

What watching an unplanned trip actually requires

Turn the problem around. When the trip is hypothetical you still know two things: the route, and roughly how long you would go for. What you cannot know is which week in the next several months the fare will be low. Any tool that makes you answer that in advance has handed the hard part back to you.

So the specification is short:

• Watch a route, not a search, so nothing expires and nothing needs rebuilding.
• Cover every airport at both ends. Differences of $150 between two fields 40 miles apart are ordinary.
• Take a trip length as a range, not a number. Minimum and maximum stay conditions in fare rules mean a five-night and a nine-night trip are separately priced products on the same route.
• Span the whole period fares exist for, which is around eleven months, rather than a few weeks either side of a date you invented.
• Judge what turns up against what that route normally costs, so the thing that reaches you is a drop rather than a wobble.

How Flydar does it

You name a route. Pick a city instead of an airport and every airport in that city is included, both ends, without you managing six searches. There is no supported-departure list to be on: if a plane flies it, it can be watched.

You describe the trip rather than the dates. A long weekend, about a week, two weeks and change, expressed as a range because that is how the trip actually exists in your head. Fares that only work for a trip you would not take never reach you.

You set the window as wide as you want, up to the full span fares are loaded for. Set it once. Your dates cannot pass, because you never named any, so there is nothing to rebuild in three months and nothing to quietly stop working.

Then it watches, and stays quiet. It learns what that route normally costs and emails you when a fare drops clearly below it. Prices rising, sales that land inside the ordinary range, banners with countdowns on them: you never hear about any of it. The judgement that the manual method demands of you every fortnight happens before the email is sent.

It tracks economy fares and it does not book anything. You get sent to buy the fare where it lives, frequently on Google Flights. There is one plan, with no tiers to work out.

When you should not pay for this

Three cases, because a piece that never reaches this section is an advertisement.

You are booking within the next week or two. There is no watching period left to sell you. That close to departure the cheap fare buckets are usually gone and the remaining direction of travel is upward, so watching mostly documents the problem. Book the seat.

You need a cabin above economy. Flydar tracks economy. Not a close call.

You are flexible about the destination. If your actual position is “somewhere warm in February,” a curated deal list is a better fit than a route watcher, and the alternatives are worth comparing.

Knowing your dates is deliberately not on that list. A trip four months out with the dates already fixed is still a fare worth watching, and it is the case free tracking serves least well: it reports that the price moved, which you can see for yourself, rather than whether it has fallen below what the route normally costs, which is the part you cannot. The comparison with Google Flights tracking works through where that line falls.

What none of the three describe is the person who knows where they want to go and not when. That person has no free option, because the free options are searches and they have no search to save.

The verdict

If you are watching a route you have not committed to, across months you cannot name, the manual version is a standing appointment with a calendar grid that you will keep for about six weeks and then quietly drop. Everybody does. It is not a discipline problem, it is that the task has no end date and no reward until the day it pays.

So the choice was never between doing it yourself and paying someone. It is between something watching the route and nothing watching it. Hand it to whatever does not get bored.