How x-tract.me works

The principle: speed and price

Ordinary flight search starts once you have already decided everything — the city, the dates, how many people are travelling. x-tract.me works the other way round: it is for people who have not decided yet but do have a few days free. So the results are built on two axes: how soon the flight leaves and what it costs.

Which leads to something worth knowing up front: the service does not price trips for a group of passengers. Every price is for one adult. We deliberately do not ask how many people are flying and we do not multiply the price by that number — pricing a family trip is a precise query to a booking system, not a fast answer to "where can I fly cheaply this weekend".

We will get to it. Passenger selection, children and infants included, is on the roadmap: the party will be passed on to the seller, with an honest note that the seller is the one who calculates the total. For now, read the price on a card as a starting point — one adult.

Why a family fare is not the price times four

Not laziness — multiplying would simply produce a wrong number. A cheap fare is capped by seat availability: there may not be four of them, and part of your booking would move up to the next price. A child's ticket is not half an adult's; it is a percentage set by the rules of that specific fare, and low-cost carriers often give no child discount at all. A child's age counts on the date of departure, not the date of purchase.

None of those conditions exist in our data. Showing a plausible invented number is worse than saying plainly: the seller confirms the total.

Where the prices come from

We do not sell tickets and we do not hold seats. The service collects prices from partners and shows what it found; the purchase happens on the seller's site.

• A price is the result of the last crawl, not a reservation. It can change between the moment you see it and the moment you buy.
• The crawler runs in the background and refreshes what it has collected regularly; rare routes are fetched on demand.
• Seat availability is not checked — only a live query to a booking system can do that.

When a seat is actually held for you

While you are looking at results here, nothing is booked. The price on a card reserves neither the seat nor the fare: at this very second someone else may be buying the same ticket, and the cheap fare goes to whoever reaches the booking stage first.

The seat becomes yours when you submit passenger details and the seller creates a booking — at which point it gets a reference number. Following a link, opening the form, even filling it in reserves nothing. The clock on holding your seat starts at the booking, not before.

How long it is held is decided by the fare rules and the seller, not by us. Typical windows:

• immediate card payment — the session is usually 15–30 minutes; miss it and the booking is cancelled and the seat goes back on sale;
• a booking with deferred payment — where the seller offers one at all, most often from a few hours to a day;
• low-cost carriers generally do not offer unpaid holds: the ticket is issued and paid for in one go.

The closer the departure, the shorter the window. Inside our 1–7 day range time limits are at their shortest, and many fares demand immediate payment within a few days of departure. "I'll think about it until tomorrow" does not work here — that is the main difference between last-minute tickets and ordinary ones.

The exact deadline is always shown on the seller's checkout page. If it differs from what is written above, the seller is right: deadlines follow the rules of that specific fare.

This is also the second reason the price can differ once you follow the link. The first is that our data is the last crawl, not a live query. The second is that the cheap fare may have gone to another buyer while you were choosing.

How the discount is calculated

If the partner sent a former price, we use it. If not, we work it out ourselves: the median of the prices we have observed on that route. The median rather than the average, so that one abnormally expensive sample does not turn into a "70% off" for the whole destination.

• With fewer than six observations on a route, no discount is calculated at all.
• A deviation within 2% is not called a discount.
• If no source worked, the offer is shown without a percentage — and it does not enter "Best value".

Baggage and fare conditions

The partner's response has no baggage field, so we decode it from the seller link. Hence three states rather than two: baggage included, no baggage, and unknown. The last one is shown as a dash.

A dash means exactly that — we do not know. Passing it off as "no baggage" would hide a perfectly good flight from you; passing it off as "baggage included" would let you down at the check-in desk.

Affiliate links

The "Go to booking" button on a card and a click on a table row lead to the seller through an affiliate link: if a purchase happens, the service earns a commission from the seller. It does not affect your price — it is the same as going there directly.

The order of results does not depend on commission. Sorting is by price, discount or date — whichever is selected in the interface — and no seller gets an advantage.

Advertising and advertisers

After you head to a ticket, the service shows a "worth taking along" block: travel insurance, mobile data abroad, and an airport transfer. Those links are marked as advertising — they run through an affiliate network's advertising links, and the link itself carries a campaign identifier.

What that means for you: the seller's price is the same whether you arrive through our link or on your own. The service earns a commission only if a purchase happens.

Why those three services: each of them costs more bought on the spot than bought ahead. A policy sold at the airport is dearer, and abroad you can no longer buy one at all. Roaming costs several times what an eSIM does. A taxi picked up at arrivals is usually twice the price of a car booked in advance at a fixed rate.

The advertiser is the service itself — the insurer, the mobile operator or the transfer company; their details are on the page the link leads to. We are an intermediary and a distributor of those adverts, not the seller of those services.