Scott Keyes
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
You just kind of got to be there watching all the time and make sure when those deals do pop up that you find them as quickly as possible and let members know because there's a rule in airfare. The better the deal, the shorter it tends to last. And so I often hear, oh, Scott, well, why do we even need going? I can search on Google Flights. I can find these deals myself. And I say, absolutely.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
Look, if we spend 16, 18 hours a day searching for airfare to make sure that we never miss those great deals, you can certainly do that. Not everybody I've come to find is similar in that love for airfare hunting. And so that's the service we try to provide for folks.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
I will talk about it in a moment, but can I lead in with my biggest cheap flight regret of my life?
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
So this was back in, gosh, I don't know, 2015, about a decade ago. And I was up late searching airfare as one does. And I stumbled across a deal over to India for $212 round trip. I remember the exact fare. You know, my heart skipped a beat. I was sweaty palms, so excited.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
And rather than taking my own advice of just booking it right away and then figure out the details later, I decided, why don't I figure out an itinerary? I've never been to India before. Let me figure out a better, you know. When I want to go, what's a good amount of time to spend there? Let me find a bunch of friends who would want to go. So I spent the next couple hours scouting all that out.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
And then when I went to actually book the flight, I missed it by 30 seconds. Right. It had just disappeared. And so the advice that you're supposed to do that I didn't take myself but now would never make this mistake again is knowing about the 24-hour rule. Mm-hmm.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
There is a federal regulation that says from the moment you hit purchase on airfare, you have a 24-hour window during which you can cancel that purchase and get your cash back. No questions asked, no requirements, just period. You get your money back. And what that does is essentially a free price freeze. You hit purchase on that flight.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
You've got it locked in for 24 hours during which you can decide, do I want to keep this flight or do I want to cancel? And so what I should have done with that India flight was book maybe one flight in, let's say, for two weeks in April. Book one flight for two weeks in May. Book one flight for two weeks in June. You're a maniac. Yeah. Yeah, totally.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
But then spend the next 24 hours deciding which one of those I want to keep and then just go ahead and cancel the other two, assuming I don't want to take three India flights in three months.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
Totally. But when there's a mistake fare, something that feels like once in a lifetime, that's what you want to make sure you get it locked in and ideally give yourself some options and then figure out after the fact which one to keep and which one to give back.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
Very important.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
They are. We've found three of them here going so far in 2025. $87 Brazil deal. their flights over to Madrid for $603 round trip in premium economy that usually costs well over $1,500, closer to $2,000. So they do still pop up. My favorite one from last year was flights to Dublin for $114 round trip. Amazing. But-
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
The bad news is mistake fares don't pop up quite as often as they did when I first started my professional cheap flight finding career. So back then, this all started when I got a mistake fare myself nonstop from New York City to Milan for $130 round trip. And I remember back then, it felt like every week or two, there was a different mistake fare. And so airlines have gotten better.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
at catching them, but they're not perfect. And once every couple of months or so, we find one of these mistake fares. The rest of the deals we find are still very, very good, but they're not quite the 90, 95% off deals that you might find with the mistake fare.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
Yeah, the thing that I love about points is that they're a great complement to cash deals. We talked about the Goldilocks windows when cheap flights are most likely to pop up. And it's basically right in the middle. The great thing about points is it's the opposite.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
You're gonna find the best deals, especially if you're trying to fly in the front of the plane, premium economy, business class, first class. Those deals are most likely to pop up right at the beginning of the schedule, about 11 months before travel, and right at the end in the last few weeks or last month before travel. And so that's why having the stash of points can be really, really helpful
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
in any deal that you're hoping to get. Because if you're in that mushy middle, maybe paying with cash is where you're most likely to see a good deal. But let's say you found out, oh my gosh, I've got next weekend off. Where can I go? Well, the cash fares might be pretty expensive, but paying with points, you might actually be able to get a pretty good deal.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
So they complement each other really nicely. And do you see any mistake points deals? Absolutely. We found one. It was in 2024 over to Finland in business class for 19,000 points round trip. That's the equivalent of about $190 for the standard one cent per point cash out. And so that flight would normally, if you're paying with cash, cost $3,3500.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
To get it for the points equivalent of $190, that would have been the deal of a lifetime for me. I've got a couple of young kids. I couldn't jump on it myself. I would have loved to. But if you don't have the Finnair points or the Amex points to transfer, you can't take advantage of that mistake fair on points.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
A hundred percent. You know, you've heard the advice in the financial world of diversifying your portfolio. It's the exact same thing with points and miles, having a diversified pool of points and miles, and especially those transferable bank points. That's essentially built-in diversity.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
Think of it as the index funds of the points world where those Amex points and Chase points can transfer to a bunch of different airlines. Hopefully, you'll be able to do it quickly. You know, you can do a quick Google search and see if it's an instant thing. transfer or if it takes some time to be able to jump on it next time there's a mistake fair.
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Oh, goodness. I mean, look, I always like focusing mostly on the bank points because that transferability, the fact that you can take an Amex point and transfer it to dozens of different airlines you can transfer to. And what the benefit is there is there might be a good, you know, the number of points it costs on Delta might be 100,000 points for this flight to Paris.
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But on Air France flying Blue Miles, it might only be 30,000. And so if you've got a bunch of Delta miles, you're out of luck. You can't really take advantage of it. But if you have a bunch of Amex points, you just transfer them over to Flying Blue, to Air France, and then you can do it just 30,000 points rather than the 100,000 it might have cost on Delta.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
Short answer, no.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
I've come to terms with the fact that I am going to be arguing this until I die. It will be on my tombstone. Scott, he didn't believe that airfare was impacted by cookies. But this is true. We searched for air for tens, hundreds of thousands, millions of of airfare every single day. If somebody was going to see prices impacted by repeated searches, it would be us, and we don't. Interesting, yeah.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
And the fact is that airfare is the most volatile thing that we purchase. That is true.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
Okay, true. Apparently, sometimes roller coasters. But the mistake that people make is this sort of Truman Show belief that the airlines are watching you. And when you search for something, they want to jack up the price to get more money from you. Weird thing is it actually has the logic backwards.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
In most forms of e-commerce, you know, when you're on, I don't know, Levi's.com and you're searching for some jeans and you click on one, but then you don't actually buy it. Levi's, they're not going to jack up the price next time you look for it. What they're going to do is they're going to hit you with a discount code. They're going to email you a coupon and say, hey, we saw you're interested.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
Would you like a 10% off promo code? And that's the way that companies tend to approach it. They actually discount ones that you've looked at not jack up the price. So the good news, it doesn't make a difference. If you don't believe me, if you're really steadfast in your belief, go ahead and search in incognito, clear your cookies. It's not going to make a difference either way.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
Totally. I did this on video once. I searched for the same flight 100 times in a row. It was a long video. And on flight search 100, just like flight search number one, the exact same. It was Denver to London for 442 bus round trip. Didn't change a penny.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
Oh, goodness. It – Probably that one. Certainly the most memorable for me. But I also had one once over to Japan for $169 round trip. Wow. Amazing. That one was unreal. The only reason I don't think of that one rather than $130 Milan flight is the $130 Milan flight ended up causing this sort of butterfly effect that resulted in me being here today as a professional cheap flight finder.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
Whereas the Japan one was just a fun vacation over to Japan.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
So that one was actually kind of odd. The logistics of it was from San Jose, but it was actually over to Taiwan. And so the way I did it was you had to fly from Taiwan over to San Jose and then back. And so you ended up having to do what's called hidden city ticketing, where you didn't take the last leg of the flight.
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It was a little bit complicated too, but suffice to say for $169, I'm willing to take a little bit extra hassle in order to make that trip happen.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
I think if you do it sparingly, you're fine. I've heard of almost nobody getting in trouble that way.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
There you go.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
Oh, goodness. So my best advice on splurging for travel is not necessarily one specific thing, but it's the timing of your splurge. I always like to splurge on the very last day. Okay. Okay. which means that your vacation ends up boiling down in your memories to how much you enjoyed it at the peak of your experience and how much you enjoyed it at the end of your experience.
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And so having a great activity or whatever it is planned for that last day, really helps shape your memories of that trip and makes it a much more – gives almost your future self a lot more joy about the trip in those memories.
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So whatever it is that you might be doing, skiing in the Alps or whatever, I always like to make sure I'm targeting it for that last day of the trip because it's going to end up giving you more joy basically for the rest of your life.
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I think the thing that I would love to see is the ability to resell your ticket after you purchase it. Wait, that's a great one. Yeah, we all kind of Forget that this is very standard practice when it comes to other tickets, right? Yeah, Taylor Swift concert, all about that.
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You buy tickets to your local NBA team, your local NFL team, whatever it is, and you decide you don't want to go, you can resell them. There are tons of reselling things. But with flights, with airfare, for some reason, we can't do that. I would love for that to be the case because it gives people a lot more flexibility to be able to change their plans after they book.
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The short answer is that the airline's pricing model is predicated on you not being able to resell. What they say is, well, we would have to charge more if we didn't know that people would be taking those flights. But the thing is, they also said this about change fees in general. They said, look, if you're able to change your plans without charging,
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paying a hefty fee, then we're going to have to charge more. And then COVID happened. And late 2020, airlines across the board got rid of change fees and no longer cost money to be able to change your plans. If you cancel, you get full amount of travel credit for a future flight. And airfare has been fine. It's basically about even with where it was pre-pandemic.
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If you adjust for overall inflation, it's way cheaper than it was in February 2020. So I don't know. I think airlines could deal fine with people reselling their tickets.
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Totally. Airlines are a little afraid of change. It's something of a little C conservative industry. And so you don't see huge changes in airline technology or the traveler experience or this and that. So I'm not holding my breath that this is going to happen anytime soon. No, no. But make me king of the airline industry for a day. That's the first thing I'm doing.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
Thank you so much. It was great chatting with you, Sally.
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Thanks so much for having me.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
Yeah, look, I think the fact that there are so many different rules about when you're supposed to should kind of be the tip off that it's a little bit of a myth. Like you've heard Tuesday at 1 p.m., Saturday at midnight, exactly 63 days before. These are all recommendations that I've heard. And they're all wrong. I think this is why that they're wrong.
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You can go back and calculate last year's airfares and find the exact cheapest day for flights just in the same way you can go back and calculate the stock market and find the single best day for stock performance. That just doesn't tell you anything about what the single best day for stock performance this year is going to be. You know, look, maybe it was March 7th last year.
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But if you bought stocks on March 7th this year, you might find yourself losing a lot of money. So that's why I think it's the wrong way to approach it. Instead, the best way to do it the way that we recommend is something called the Goldilocks window. Not too early, not too late, just right in the middle.
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And so if you're traveling, for instance, domestically during off-peak travel dates, about one to three months in advance, that's when you have the best odds of a cheap flight popping up. If you're going during a peak travel period, summer, Christmas, New Year, something like that, three to six months in advance for those domestic flights.
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But international, more like two to eight months off peak, four to 10 months during peak travel period. That's the best way to get the timing of your booking right.
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Yeah, look, I think that most people say they want cheap flights. And then the way they go about trying to find cheap flights is the exact opposite right approach. Here's what I mean. We all say, oh, I really want to get cheap flights. Airfare is so expensive. And then we do a three-step process when we search for flights. Step one, we decide where we want to go.
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Step two, we decide when we want to go there. And step three, we look, well, what are the prices cost? What are the flights at? Does that sound about right, Sally? Does that sound like the way that you might search for flights usually?
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That's true. That's true. But look, by setting price as the last priority, it's not terribly surprising we end up with some pretty expensive flights. And so what I tell folks is like, look, if cheap flights are a priority – Make them the priority. Take that same three-step process and reverse your search.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
Step one, where are there cheap flights available right now out of my home airport, knowing that that changes every day? Step two, of those places that are available cheap right now, which one interests me the most? Where would I like to go? And step three, what dates do they have those cheap flights available that work for my schedule?
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So by setting prices the top priority rather than the last priority, That's how you end up being able to get cheap flights and take three or four vacations for the same price you used to pay for one.
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Totally. You know, it's funny you mentioned that exact destination. I remember, you know, interviewing a couple for a book I wrote a few years back and they had the exact same experience where a mistake fair from Columbus, Ohio to Zagreb, Croatia.
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Oh my goodness. Yeah, it was under 350 bucks round trip.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
They might've been. They had never thought of going to Zagreb, but they were like, for that price, you know, look, we'd fly that same amount to fly down to Florida or to go over to Texas. Let's go to Croatia. Let's be serendipitous. And they ended up having the trip of a lifetime.
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So I think leaving yourself open to serendipity is a great way, not only to be able to get cheap flights, but to take much more interesting, unexpected vacations than you might otherwise.
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Obviously, if you're only traveling with a backpack, it's definitely going to save you money. Because I've looked at flights from my home airport in Portland down to Las Vegas, and the Spirit flight costs $25 each way. The next closest Alaska flight costs $130. So an extra over $100. But You mentioned once you start taking into account some of the fees.
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It can easily get more expensive for the budget airline. So obviously, you want to be very cognizant of the fees. I'm not telling folks anything that they don't know. But the thing that I think they might overlook And I'm going to give you one good reason to fly a budget airline and one reason to avoid them. Okay, hit me.
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So the good reason for budget airlines is, especially to leisure destinations like Vegas and Orlando, they actually have the most nonstop flights. So for many folks, if you're flying from Minneapolis, you're flying from I don't know, Des Moines, Iowa or San Antonio or something like that, you actually might be able to get a nonstop flight to Las Vegas or Orlando on a budget airline.
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But if you were flying a full service airline, you might have to connect in Dallas or Chicago or something like that. So it'd be a quicker flight in many instances on the budget airline. The reason to avoid them that most folks don't necessarily think about is that budget airlines have far fewer flights on the schedule.
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And so if you've got a flight to Vegas on Spirit and that flight gets canceled, it might be a while until there's the next available Spirit flight to your destination. They don't have partnerships. They don't have what are called interline agreements with other airlines to put you on a different carrier. So you could actually be waiting days to get a replacement flight.
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That's something that usually doesn't happen if you're on Delta or United.
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Exactly. The downside risk with budget airlines can be a lot worse than the downside risk with full-service airlines.
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Absolutely. Look, I'll gladly fly Spirit To Las Vegas, if it means nonstop versus a connecting flight on a full-service airline.
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Secrets to Finding Cheap Flights and Avoiding Fees, Straight from Scott’s Cheap Flights
So the funny thing about searching for good airfare for those really cheap flights is that you don't really have much advance warning. There's not a weather report, a 10-day advance notice of what airfare is to come.