How many times have you booked a flight only to discover a few days later that the price just dropped? If only you had waited…
Those days are gone now, and you can book away without paying much attention to the price, as long as you’re going to use a new service called DoNotPay. The site checks flight prices automatically, over 17,000 times a day, and when it finds discounts it’ll use legal loopholes to get you on the cheapest flight, and you’ll be refunded the difference in the process.
The service is legal to use, Business Insider reports, and you don’t have to pay anything for it. If DoNotPay sounds familiar, that’s because the same service has been used to overturn hundreds of thousands of parking tickets and to assist Equifax hack victims in suing the company.
“As with everything before it, I’m not looking to make money with this specific service,” DoNotPay founder Josh Browder told Business Insider. “I am just trying to build a great product and one day, expand this product to insurance, healthcare, and retail, where there may be an opportunity to make it sustainable.”
The travel section of the DoNotPay website covers flight and hotel prices — check it out at this link.
“In the US (unlike Europe unfortunately), there are about 70 different loopholes that will make even the most non-refundable ticket refundable,” Browder said. “For example, if bad weather is predicted for your flight, the schedule changes, the airlines contract with you required them to open it up. Similarly, every single flight can be refunded before 24 hours [after it’s booked]. Since airline prices change so often, it’s highly unlikely you got in at the bottom, so when it drops, it automatically applies one of these many rules to your ticket and switches you to the cheaper ticket in the same fare class.”
Browder said that in a private test with just a few hundred users, the company discovered that 68% of flights saw price drops by an average of $140, and price cuts went all the way up to $650. That’s a lot of money you could be saving, so it seems crazy not to check it out.
