Overpay for airfare, then let Yapta find refunds
The flights you've bought or want to follow appear on Yapta's site.
Budget travelers will snap up cheap airfares the instant a price drops, even knowing they'll have to squeeze into a fetal position on cramped, red-eye flights with lengthy layovers. Hopefully, a novel new travel assistant could help you be more discriminating.
Unlike Farecast (read more), which predicts fare fluctuations to help plan before you buy, Yapta also follows the costs of flights you've already purchased so you can take advantage of an air-travel secret.
Many air carriers will refund some of the difference if, say, the $1,000 Barcelona round-trip you booked in March now costs only $350. Yapta tracks fares for flights that you've flagged and alerts you when prices plummet. At that point, though, you'll have to call the airline yourself to claim your discount--and miss out if the price jumps before you reach a human on the line. You must also make sure that you purchased the fare from the airline itself for the price guarantee to apply.
Yapta's badge lets you flag flights found on 14 sites.
Yapta works by plugging into Internet Explorer (not Firefox yet) and letting you tag flights as you look them up at 14 airline and flight-finder Web sites, including American, Delta, Orbitz, Expedia, and Travelocity. Alas, my favorites, SideStep and Kayak, aren't included. When you perform an airfare search, a "Tag It with Yapta" badge appears next to the results. Just click that badge, and then you'll see the ups and downs of your flights when you log on to Yapta.
The acronym for this service stands for "Your Amazing Personal Travel Assistant." I can't say it has lived up to the name by saving me money, since I haven't bought any tickets recently, but I'll definitely put Yapta to the test for summertime trips.
The YAPTA site does not have information about it?
(or is it just limited to the airlines listed in the drop down menu?)
If you purchase a ticket, and the fare drops, you MAY be eligible to downgrade that fare, but for a price. If you purchased an international ticket, let's say, that carries a $200 penalty, and the ticket cost $1000. The fare drops to $600. You're only going to get back $200, and it's not a refund, it's a voucher good for one year. That's if any downgrades are allowed. Most internet fares do not allow downgrades. The only person this would benefit is someone who buys a full, unrestriced, fully refundable published fare, in which case, you would just refund the ticket per the fare rules and buy a new ticket all together at the lower price.
Buyer, beware. I spend my days cleaning up the mistakes of online bookers, and it's a mess when Orbitz or Travelocity et al tell their customers to call the carrier, and they've purchased a bulk ticket that has no flexibility but they've been told otherwise. In the span of 2 hours today, I took 3 calls about YAPTA and had to explain that, sorry, no, we don't owe you a refund/voucher/free flight/etc and get yelled at because YAPTA said we did.
Read that fine print, you're spending your hard earned money.