How "cheap flights" actually work

There are roughly four reasons a flight gets cheap, and only one of them is what people mean when they say "deal."

The four buckets

Distressed inventory. Airlines forecast demand months out and refile schedules constantly. When a route under-performs — a new city pair, a season that didn't materialise, a competitor that surprised — the carrier dumps seats into a low fare class to keep the load factor on target. These look like deals because they are.

Mistakes. Genuine error fares (a missing zero, a currency mix-up, a stale published-fare tape) are rare and live for hours, not days. Most "mistake fare" alerts you see have already been pulled.

Promotional bait. Sale prices that exist for a 10-day window in March, fly only on three Tuesdays in February, and require a Saturday-night stay. The headline is real; the route you want isn't covered.

Hidden-city / nested itineraries. Not actually cheaper for the airline — cheaper to you because the pricing engine still rewards complicated routings. Useful, but they break things (no checked bags, no missed-segment forgiveness, possible account flags).

What to do with this

If you want fares from bucket 1, you need a system that watches the market continuously and surfaces the dips when they happen — not a weekly newsletter. That's the gap Flyozo is filling. Set the route, set the budget, and let the alert come to you.

The rest you can mostly ignore.