Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

1. Why can't I find the listed price when I shop the booking site?
2. Do you check for available seats?
3. How do I book these fares?
4. What are the Taxes and Fees?
5. Why does the departure/arrival city suggestions show City Codes and not Airport Codes?
6. How are you different from Kayak and Sidestep?
7. What cities do you support?
8. Do all airlines provide their fares?
9. What are Web Fares?
10. How often are the fares updated?

1. What is RSS?
2. How do I start using RSS feeds?
3. Can you recommend any RSS Readers?
4. What RSS feeds does FareCompare provide?

Visit our download page for the latest plug-ins, extensions and documentation

We believe we can improve the current shopping process by providing relevant information to consumers in a timely fashion. Future releases will include additional features making it easier for airlines to effectively sell seats and helping consumers to be confident they have found the best option available.
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We receive and process fares directly from the airlines. Each fare we show is a valid fare on that airline. Unfortunately, sometimes inventory (seats) is limited/unavailable for the selected fare on your selected dates. On average each airline files from 10-20 fares between any two cities. On every shopping request the airlines reservation system decides whether they will allow a seat to be sold at that price. The decision to release inventory (seats) at a particular price is based on several factors which include the following:

1. The most obvious is that all seats are sold out on the flights those days which occurs many times to popular destinations during their peak times
2. If flights are relatively full on the dates you select they will charge a premium by only releasing seats at the next higher fare price because they want to reserve seats for higher paying business travelers who book less than 14 days prior to travel
3. Airlines consider business travel on Monday mornings and Friday evenings peak and will many times release only more expensive seats during those times
4. Airlines also consider return travel on Sunday's for leisure travelers to be peak

It makes sense to check back periodically (assuming you have a cushion of time before you travel), because prices and inventory change frequently throughout the day.

We recommend that you begin your research as early as possible and track changes. Normally leisure travelers must book no later than 14-21 days before departure. Airlines do have short-term promotions that can provide lower prices closer to departure but these promotions are typically not announced in advance. You should sign up for our RSS feeds or Email Early Warning System to be notified immediately of these changes.
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We currently query for seats before providing the link to the final booking site(s). We do this to try to avoid people not finding the quoted price on the booking sites because of lack of seat inventory.
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FareCompare is a research site designed to simplify the shopping process. At the end of the process we put deep links to the carrier sites and/or affiliate booking sites (travelocity, expedia, orbitz, priceline, etc.) for you to complete your online booking.
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All intra U.S. / Canada fare prices are round-trip and include the base fare, any fare related surcharges (usually fuel) and the 7.5% U.S. Ticket Tax. On the final detail pages we estimate the additional taxes and fees which include the "U.S. Security Fee" of up to $10 per trip, "U. S. Flight Segment Tax" of $3.30 for each take off/landing per trip and the "Passenger Facility Charges" (PFC) ranging from $3.00-$4.50 per enplaning airport.

All international fare prices are round-trip and include the base fare and any fare related surcharges (usually fuel) and insurance fees. In the near future on the final detail page we will be displaying estimated international taxes and fees which can be up to $180 depending on the routing taken for the trip.

See the official tax guide (PDF).
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Fares are filed based on city codes versus airport codes. Unfortunately in many cities like New York, Detroit, Washington, Orlando, Houston, and a handful of others, the city code is not the same as the airport code. We have had lots of feedback from people in those cities that this is confusing because many times the city code is also a remote airport code in that city. We may in the near future change this so it does not display a code in suggest at all to avoid confusion. For the moment, in those cases where the city code has different airport code(s), we put "All-Airports" in the name to hopefully avoid this confusion.
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FareCompare gets the raw fare data from the airlines directly and we process it several hours before it is available on the online travel agencies and many times the airline sites themselves. We are not a meta-search engine which "scrapes" the data from other sites using HTML scraping or API's. Our system contains over 30 million airfares and we process millions of fare changes throughout the day. We provide information on our site to empower each user with tools normally only available to fare analysts at the airlines. Our goal is to provide the information you need to make the best informed decision before you jump to the airline site, online travel agency, or meta-search engine (Kayak, SideStep, Mobissimo) to finalize your booking.
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FareCompare processes all published fares filed for US and Canadian markets as well as international travel to and from North America. FareCompare does not include intra-(European, Central/South America, Africa, Asia, Middle East) fares at this time.
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Two major airlines in the US market allow only direct bookings. Southwest Airlines does not file its fares publicly and JetBlue Airways provides only a portion of its fares. For this reason Southwest and JetBlue Airways are not included in FareCompare results and also do not appear at the major online travel agencies.
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A "web fare" is a fare only sold through internet sites and many times only on the airline site itself. In most cases a web fare is related to a highly restricted last minute "weekend" deal (depart/return fri/mon sat/tue) and intended for very flexible travelers. On rare occasions a web fare will be the low fare in a particular city-pair. FareCompare is working with the airlines to get these web fares released to us so we can include them in our fare displays.
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Domestic airfare updates are published three times per day Monday through Friday and once per day on Saturday and Sunday. FareCompare processes new fares in under 5 minutes whereas fare updates are released 2-4 hours later at travel agencies and airlines. (Mon-Fri 10:00 a.m / noon / 8:00 p.m., Saturday 8:00 p.m, and Sunday 6:00 p.m. EST).

International fares to/from North America are updated 5 times a day.
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RSS stands for 'Really Simple Syndication' and it allows you to identify the content you like and have it delivered directly to you.
Not all websites currently provide RSS, but it is growing rapidly in popularity and many new sites, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and CNN do provide it.
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In general, the first thing you need is a news reader. There are many different versions, some of which are accessed using a browser, and some of which are downloadable applications. All allow you to display and subscribe to the RSS feeds you want.
Once you have chosen a news reader, all you have to do is to decide what content you want. For example, if you would like the latest New York Times Business stories, simply visit the Business section and you will notice an orange RSS button.
If you click on the button you can subscribe to the feed in various ways, including by dragging the URL of the RSS feed into your news reader or by cutting and pasting the same URL into a new feed in your news reader.
My Yahoo provides auto-subscription. When you click on the My Yahoo button it will open your Yahoo account and allow you to easily complete your subscription. This is a free service and is widely supported by content providers.
Some browsers, including Firefox, Opera and Safari, have functionality which automatically picks up RSS feeds for you. For more details on these, please check their websites.
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For a complete up-to-date list of reader applications, click here. For additional information on RSS, we recommend the resource site maintained by the Harvard Law School.

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FareCompare has 2 basic RSS feeds that it supports which can be found on the "Trip Search" and "Destinations" result pages by clicking the icon.

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