Spontaneous.travel surfaces "where can I afford to go" candidates. Flight prices on cards are recently observed fares, not live bookable offers. Here is what each label means, where the number comes from, and how to verify before booking.

● Fare observed · Xh ago

We saw this exact route + departure date + return date sell at this fare within the last 24 hours. The "Xh ago" tells you how stale the observation is. The number comes from one of two sources:

Travelpayouts cached fares (the affiliate network behind Aviasales) with their found_at timestamp.
Our own scraper of Kiwi.com, captured via Playwright on our infrastructure. We refresh hot routes on a rolling cadence and pre-warm popular searches.

Fares can move materially inside 24 hours. Treat "observed" as a strong signal of affordability, not a quote. The button below the price always sends you to Aviasales to verify the live fare before you book.

○ Estimated from recent fare data

We didn't see this exact route + date pair in the last 24 hours. The number comes from Travelpayouts' broader cached fare data for the route — it can be hours or days old and often reflects the cheapest combo somewhere in the month, not your exact dates. Treat it as a rough signal of affordability for the route, then verify on Aviasales for your specific dates.

What happens when you click a flight CTA

"Check final fares on Aviasales" opens Aviasales in a new tab with your route and dates pre-filled. Aviasales is a flight comparison engine that shows live offers from many online travel agencies. The final fare you book is whatever Aviasales shows you — we don't sit between you and the booking page.

We earn a small commission if you book through that link. The commission does not affect the price you pay and does not change the ranking on this site (the ranking is purely Daily Spending Power = budget − flight − accommodation ÷ trip days).

Hotels and activities

Hotel prices on cards are estimates from cost-of-living data, tiered into hostel, standard hotel, and luxury hotel per night. They are not live Booking.com quotes. When you commit to a destination and dates on an itinerary page, we surface real Booking.com options with their own freshness timestamps. Activities are pulled from Klook with prices labelled as estimates.

Why not show live prices on every card?

Truly live prices for every (origin, destination, departure day, return day) combination across hundreds of destinations would cost more than any pre-revenue travel site can afford to fetch on every search. Our trade-off: be honest about what's an estimate, scrape the most popular tuples to keep "observed" coverage high, and verify the moment you commit by handing off to Aviasales for the actual booking.

When something looks wrong

Email christophe@spontaneous.travel with the route, dates, and a screenshot. We calibrate the labels and the scraper based on real misses. Price-accuracy bug reports are the single most useful signal we get.