How Flight Signal scores flight deals
We observe live return-fare prices from London every day and store them. A fare becomes a "deal" only when its price is low relative to that route's own recorded history — never against a made-up "was" price. Every claimed saving stores the baseline and the exact method behind it.
1. We observe
Each day a scheduled job queries licensed fare data for return trips from the five London airports (Heathrow, Gatwick, City, Luton, Stansted) across our tracked destinations, and commits every observation — origin, destination, dates, price, timestamp — to a version-controlled history. Nothing is scraped; no anti-bot measures are bypassed.
2. We build a baseline
For each route we derive a rolling median from the observations themselves once we hold enough of them. Until a route has enough history, we fall back to a hand-set benchmark, clearly flagged as a cold-start proxy rather than observed history. The median, the sample size and the window are all stored with the fare.
3. We score
A fare's deal score combines how far below its baseline it sits with signals for stops, journey length, trip length, departure airport and timing. A price is only called a deal when the maths says so — a strict daily cap means only the genuinely exceptional fares are ever pushed.
4. "Is now a good time?"
On each destination page we compare the cheapest fare observed in the last 10 days against the full distribution of every fare we've recorded on that route. At or below the cheapest quartile (p25) we call it unusually low; at or below the median, fair; above the median, above typical. The quartiles and observation count are shown so you can check the call yourself.
What we never do
- No auto-booking, and never any passport or payment-card data.
- No fabricated "was" prices — only distributions of fares we actually observed.
- No
Product/Offermarkup on volatile fares (it would misrepresent a price that changes hourly). - High-risk unconventional fares (e.g. hidden-city) are opt-in only and clearly labelled — never mixed with normal fares.
Did the deals hold up?
We keep an honest scorecard: every past alert compared against what its route did next, including the ones where the price later dropped further. See the alert track record.