A few months ago, I had written about Farefetch, a site where people can submit fare requests and anyone (like you) can sign up to fulfill the requests if you find a fare that meets their parameters. One unique thing with Farefetch is that they not only allow but encourage you to potentially use your own miles and points to fulfill the other person’s fare request.
While I do offer an award booking service, think of this as a crowd-sourced award booking service for the masses.
I do feel like at least the part about using your miles to book other people’s flights is something that is unsustainable, rife for abuse, and likely to be either shut down by Farefetch or get people banned by their frequent flier mile program of choice
Farefetch now LIVE
I signed up to be a fare “fetcher” and was patiently waiting. Farefetch had targeted to go live in mid-June and when mid-June (and July and most of August) had gone by without hearing anything from them, I assumed that there were business model or other problems. I reached out to my contact at Farefetch and he did not respond, which was another indicator.
But last night I got an email that Farefetch was now live and early this morning I got my first booking with details as shown below
So I looked to see what was available, using Google Flights (READ MORE: 6 reasons why Google Flights is the BEST search engine) and found this
While flying Spirit may not be in the SPIRIT of the request (though maybe it is), it does fulfill the request and maybe they didn’t want to bring any bags. I submitted my request, and received a notice from Farefetch
I was not the first to respond, which is not unexpected, given that the email came out at 3:08 a.m. EDT and I did not respond till about 6 hours later. Guess one of you other farefetchers got it!
Did you sign up to be a farefetcher? What do you think of their business model?
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With all due respect, this is not user friendly. Why would you promote this site?
Non changeable and no refundable? For what, so you can earn a few dollars?
You are misleading your following. What happens to the consumer in the event of an airline cancellation? Is there a resource to help them? I think not.
Thanks for the comments Rachel. As far as I know, Farefetch has policies in place to handle things like cancellation but as always, buyer beware. For the record, I am not paid by Farefetch as far as I know
With all due respect, this response seemed WAY out of left field. FareFetch is a travel site, he was writing about it and that’s it. He didn’t try to get people to use it, other than by promoting it through talking about it at all, and he didn’t even get the fare that he was talking about.
I appreciated the article, I had read about FareFetch previously and think it’s very interesting. As far as I know there are not any complaints about the site (yet) so I’m SO confused where you’re coming from. Just my $.02.
I tried getting that one at 4am and no luck. The other ones that have come out today are just ridiculous though: LAS to SMR with only 1 stop for $315….. 1st, there is no way that I see to do this itinerary with only one stop since everything to SMR has to go through Bogota and flights are up around $700 to start. Or the Beijing to Hong Kong for $45…even if could find something that worked, it would not be worth the time to book it when you could only possibly get a few dollars out of it. They need to have some type of sanity check for submitting these requests or they are going to lose a lot of farefetchers as will be seen as a waste of time on unrealistic booking requests.
Yup – agree on all counts
Maybe the site could be called “far fetched” in that you will be fetching far and wide to monetize it.
Also, to Grumpy up above – the assumption is that we are all mature minded individuals seeking information and this site is about consolidation of valuable information that we can use to make decisions- a knowledge base. Please refrain from blasting the curator as he is an unpaid messenger- and a good one at that ⭐️
From what I’ve seen, some of the fare requests are certainly “farfetched”…. 🙂
Thanks for writing about farefetch – it’s an interesting idea and worth checking out. It can help people who don’t have the knowledge or time to find the best fare and gives people who have the knowledge and time to earn money from the difference.
I did sign up as a farefetcher and so far, every request I received was completely unrealistic in the combination of fare & routing, all about half of the best fares on that route and not even attractive if you were to buy the ticket with miles (which I personally wouldn’t do)… there isn’t really any “trick” to purchasing a non-stop, one-way on a route only served by one airline, for example…
It appears to me that there are plenty of people looking for the best fare on their own, then enter some “moon shot” fare as the target just to see if it’s out there…
farefetch has some work cut out to filter out unreasonable requests that are a waste of time for the farefetchers. If they can do it, this could be a viable marketplace. If they don’t, I certainly won’t waste my time…
And now we’re being spammed with absolutely useless requests…
Moscow -> Berlin in Business roundtrip for $2.
SERIOUSLY?!
Yeah, pretty ridiculous that all three today were for $2 flights. I requested to be removed as a farefetcher yesterday and got a reply that I was removed but I am still getting these even more annoying requests.