Interview: The Indie Airfare Deals Site That Has Flight Geeks Talking

The first time I heard about The Flight Deal was in a Flyertalk thread on ultra cheap airfares a few years back. Among the discussions, one casual user gave credit to "TFD" in a wayward link, everyone quietly nodded and the crowd moved on. Here in 2014, "credit to The Flight Deal" has become a common reference in the forums and out in social media. Over the past years, the group has been tirelessly scouring for and posting airfare deals, posting them to their Wordpress-backed site and earning a place as a core competitor to Airfarewatchdog, the gorilla (or rather, canine) in the indie flight deal game. Their success lies in their tenacity for finding good deals. Searching for airfare from any particular city can include an exhaustive set of variables from date range to target destination to layover city, and the summation of all of those permutations can add up to thousands of searches per city per day. The Flight Deal has overcome these challenges by coming up with tools to automatically search and sort airfares as they're published. Once their system flags an airfare that the staff qualifies as a deal, one of their editors vets the fare, builds a post, publishes an article on their site and pushes out a message into social media. In addition to their fare searching technology though, TFD has also earned a reputation as a sharply focused and impersonal brand. Click the "about" section of their website and you'll learn a bit about the ethos of the site but not about who's running it or how. Reach out