Find low fares with Travelocity’s new fare-tracking service

Planning a trip sometime in the future? You may want to try out Travelocity‘s newly expanded fare-tracking service. FareWatcher Plus tracks round-trip fares on up to 10 routes and emails updates to subscribers when prices change. The expanded service also searches prices for vacation packages and hotels, and suggests destinations by 10 different themes, including sun and beach, family, and romance.

To set up an email notification, users enter a city pair and select how long to watch a trip—indefinitely, for three months, for six months, or until a specified date. Users can choose to receive email alerts or track fares online only. FareWatcher’s options include notifications when fares drop by $25, rise or drop by $25, or drop below a specified price.

Travelocity’s service works best with domestic routes. When you receive a fare notification, FareWatcher directs you to a page you’d see had you searched using Travelocity’s “flexible dates” option. You then have to select a specific airline’s fare, and go through the booking process as you’d normally do, and the total price is only displayed at the end of the process. Since Travelocity disabled that option for international routes last year, you have to select exact dates to search international fares, without being able to search for several days beyond your ideal dates.

Personally, I still prefer Orbitz’s DealDetector. It allows users to enter specific dates with up to three “bonus dates” on each end of the trip. Since I usually know when I want to travel, I like the option of tracking prices over a specific travel period—if I wanted to travel in December, I wouldn’t care if flights were cheaper in March. Plus, DealDetector fares are displayed including all taxes and fees in Orbitz’s easy-to-scan matrix, so what you see is what you get.