Why we drop budget carriers from Travelglitch
Spirit, Frontier, Avelo, Breeze — they're cheap on paper, expensive in practice. Here's the deny-list that filters them out before you ever see an alert.
When you watch a fare on Travelglitch, the scraper hits SerpAPI's google_flights engine and gets back every itinerary that satisfies your origin, destination, and date. Most of those itineraries are useless to most people, even when the price is technically right. So we drop them before the detector ever sees the number.
The deny list
Nine ULCC and budget carriers are filtered out at parse time: Spirit, Frontier, Sun Country, Allegiant, Avelo, Breeze, Norse Atlantic, Ryanair, easyJet, Wizz Air, Wow, Viva Aerobus, Viva Air, and EgyptAir. If any segment of an itinerary is operated by one of these, the entire itinerary is dropped. Even if the codeshare looks like a tier-1 carrier on the marketing.
The reasoning is operational, not snobbish. ULCC tickets often don't include a personal item, change fees are punitive, and the schedule reliability when something does go wrong is an order of magnitude worse than legacy carriers. A $99 mistake fare on Spirit that becomes a $400 walk-up on American 12 hours into your trip is a worse outcome than just buying a $300 American ticket up front.
What's allowed
Domestic US routes only show fares where every segment is American Airlines. International routes use a curated allowlist of about 20 premium carriers — the legacy US three plus the obvious international names (Singapore, Qatar, Cathay, ANA, JAL, Lufthansa, BA, Air France, KLM, etc.). If a route has zero allowed carriers on a given day, the result is dropped with a clear 'no tier-1 flights' error rather than handed to you with a misleading price.
Flex dates
If you set `flex_days: 1..3` on a target, the scraper expands the search to ±N days around your requested date and returns the cheapest tier-1 fare across the window. The deny-list still applies on every date in the window. Cost scales linearly: ±1 day is 3 SerpAPI calls per check, ±3 days is 7. Per-target opt-in keeps the cost contained.
Ask us to add a carrier
The intl allowlist is hand-curated and definitely missing some good carriers (Aeromexico, Avianca, AirTran-era folks). Email apache3corp@gmail.com if you want one added. We'll review and either ship the change or tell you why we dropped it.