Victoria By Miriam Kessler, a travel industry lawyer and consumer rights advocate.
A 33-year-old remote worker Maya spent three evenings refreshing tabs for one European fare.
At 3:12 AM, it dropped to a tenth of its usual price. A pricing mistake, what the industry calls an error fare.
By morning it was gone. Repriced. As if it never happened.
Miriam Kessler, a travel industry lawyer and consumer rights advocate, says she can’t stop repeating that story.
“Someone got that ticket. Someone always does,” she told me. “It’s just never you.”
Kessler has spent her career reading the fine print airlines hope you skip. And she can explain exactly why you keep missing these fares – and how to flip it.
These mistakes aren’t rare – they’re just hidden from you
Airlines publish millions of fares through automated systems. Mistakes slip through constantly – a misplaced decimal, a missing surcharge.
You’ve seen the threads in every travel forum: someone posts a jaw-dropping fare, and by the time you click, it’s dead.
Those threads get one thing right: the fares are real.
What they miss, says Kessler, is that the big search sites are built to hide them from you.
Their systems treat a sudden 90% drop as a bug, not a bargain – they filter it out and show a “safe” averaged price instead of the live, split-second low.
Why? Stable prices keep their booking partners profitable – and give airlines time to quietly fix the mistake.
“The mechanism simply wasn’t built for your benefit,” Kessler says. “And it counts on you not noticing.”
The cost of never seeing the real low: $200-$400 on almost every flight
Book at the averaged price instead of the true low, and you overpay $200 to $400 per flight.
For someone who can work from anywhere, that’s not a rounding error. That’s the second trip you didn’t take this year.
“This shouldn’t be how it works,” Kessler says. So she shares what she’d give any client – a way to check for yourself.
A lawyer’s 3-point checklist for spotting a genuine price drop
1. Know the route’s normal price. A real drop is dramatic against history – not a “sale” banner on last week’s fare.
2. Confirm it in more than one place. A genuine fare shows on the airline’s own site and at least one other booking site. A lonely listing is often a glitch that won’t ticket.
3. Check the clock. Real drops live for hours. A “deal” that’s still there next week was never a mistake – it was the price.
But Kessler admits something, as someone who reads fine print for a living: “The checklist was never the hard part. Being awake at 3:12 AM is.”
Here’s what the AI Deal Score does at 3 AM that no human can
It’s why she points people to RatePunk.
Its software scans fares from your home airport 24/7 across airlines and booking sites – including drops that vanish overnight.
Every fare gets an AI Deal Score from 0 to 100 based on price history, savings, route and timing – “my checklist, run by a machine that never sleeps,” as Kessler puts it.
Only fares scoring 80 or higher ever reach you. Everything else gets filtered out – for once, in your favor.
When a fare makes the cut, you get a short alert with just the essentials:
- The route – departing from your own airport
- The dates – the exact days that unlock it
- The price – and what you’re saving
- The link – one button to book safely
That’s how members have caught flights to Europe under $400, business class to London for $720, and Orlando for $77 round trip per person – while doing anything but refreshing tabs.
Sixty seconds to set up – and no fine print to decode
If you can read a text message, you can use RatePunk. Setup is one question – where do you fly from? – and alerts arrive by email or push. It’s a real app on the iOS and Android stores with hundreds of thousands of members.
It’s not a booking site – every alert is just information, and you book directly wherever the fare is cheapest.
And it isn’t error-fares-only. Mistakes, flash sales, quiet drops – if a price is genuinely exceptional, it gets scored. If it isn’t, you never hear about it.
“That’s the part I appreciate as a lawyer,” Kessler adds. “There’s no homework hiding in it.”
The next mistake will happen at 3 AM
One honest warning from Kessler: fares flagged 80+ typically stay visible only briefly before airlines reprice them.
That’s not a countdown timer – that’s the mechanism, and exactly why alerts beat searching.
The next mistake is coming, and someone will get that ticket.
“For once,” says Kessler, “it should be you.”
