How we score deals
Last updated: July 23, 2026
Where prices come from
flights.run continuously collects cached round-trip prices that travellers recently found on flight booking sites (via the Travelpayouts/Aviasales data service). Every price you see is the total in Canadian dollars, including taxes and mandatory fees, exactly as it appeared on the booking site — and every price shows when it was found. Cached prices can change or sell out, so the booking site you land on always shows the live price.
What "typical price" means
For each route and travel month we track the cheapest fare observed each day and build a distribution from up to 18 months of those daily-cheapest fares. The typical price is the median; the typical range shown on route pages is the middle 50% (25th–75th percentile). We publish the number of data days behind every figure, and when history is thin we say so ("limited history").
Deal tiers
- Good price — roughly 20%+ below the typical price for that route and month.
- Great deal — roughly 35%+ below typical, or below the route's cheapest-decile.
- Exceptional — 50%+ below typical and a strong statistical outlier.
- Possible mistake fare — extreme outliers are held for manual review and clearly labeled; airlines don't always honour mistake fares.
On routes where we don't yet have enough history, tiers are labeled "estimated" and come from a distance-based model calibrated to the Canadian market. As history accumulates, real route statistics take over automatically.
What we don't do
We don't predict whether a fare will rise or fall — independent research shows such predictions are unreliable. We detect fares that are genuinely cheap versus history, and a deal is only listed after it has been seen on at least two separate scans.