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So, there are plenty of sites that will tell you if flight prices in your search results are "high" or "low".

Are there any sites or apps that will let you set a "strike" price for flights that meet given criteria? By this, I mean, you can say "buy if prices go below XXX"?

If not, are there any specific regulatory or industry reasons why not? It seems like a handy thing to have.

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Many sites allow you set an alert, i.e. you get a notification if the price falls.

Example: https://www.skyscanner.com/tips-and-inspiration/always-get-best-airfare-available-skyscanner-price-alerts

Anything more than this would not really be helpful. Airline prices these days are NOT apples to apples, i.e. there are many fees for bags, seats reservation, carry on, food, fare class, etc. There can be also massive differences in number of stops, flight time, layover time, etc. Even two tickets at the same or very similar nominal price may present very different value to you depending on your specific needs & preferences.

Automated booking is a non-starter. An airline booking requires quite a bit of information, a lot of which is confidential. It needs to be secure and can't easily be stored by 3rd parties. You are also required to manually accept the terms and conditions of the specific ticket for the specific airline. To give a you flavor: the terms& conditions for a ticket I bought in January had 751 pages. This was just a single itinerary with a single airline.

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  • I don't think automated booking is as infeasible as you suggest. I've never seen a booking require some special bits of information apart from my name,billing address,contact information and card data,maybe DoB as well. Any online shop already handles these. The only difference between an ordinary OTA and an automated booking system would be that the booking doesn't happen immediately but at some unknown point in the future. And the system could easily list the T&C's of twenty different airlines for you to pre-approve. (Most would just click "Accept all" anyway.)
    – TooTea
    Jul 17, 2021 at 20:46

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