How Wingit Works · Updated June 2026
450 Million Fares. 3 Scans a Day.
How Wingit monitors airline pricing databases, builds route benchmarks, and surfaces the moments when fares fall significantly below what a route normally costs.
Most flight deal services work the same way: they monitor fare databases, compare prices against a historical benchmark, and alert you when prices drop significantly. What makes Wingit different is the specificity — it's built entirely for routes from Indian airports, with benchmarks calibrated to Indian departure prices. Here's exactly how it works.
How Airlines Actually Price Flights
Before explaining how Wingit finds deals, it helps to understand what it's scanning.
Airlines don't publish a single price for each seat. They file thousands of fares to ATPCO (Airline Tariff Publishing Company), a clearinghouse used by over 440 airlines. At any given time, there are approximately 450 million active fares in this system. From ATPCO, fares are distributed to the three major Global Distribution Systems (GDS) — Amadeus, Sabre, and Travelport — which power every OTA, airline website, and travel agent booking system in the world.
Each fare has a booking class (fare bucket) — a single letter like Y, M, Q, N, or S. These determine the cabin level, refundability, change fees, and mileage earning rate. Airlines can slash fares in low-inventory buckets without changing their standard prices. A DEL–DXB route might have 200 seats at Rs. 45,000 and 4 seats at Rs. 18,000 — both in economy, same aircraft, same service.
Cabin level
Y, J, C, F = full-price economy and premium cabins. M, W, B = Economy/Premium Economy mid-fare. Q, N, S, T, V = deep-discount economy buckets.
Refundability
Higher buckets (Y, B) are fully refundable. Lower buckets (N, Q) are non-refundable with stiff change fees. Same physical seat, completely different contract.
Mileage earning
Your miles earned depend on booking class, not just cabin. A Q-bucket economy ticket may earn 25% of miles; a Y-bucket earns 100% of the same flight.
How Wingit Scans for Deals
Wingit runs three detection cycles per day: 5:30 AM, 12:30 PM, and 9:00 PM IST — timed to catch fare-loading windows across different airline working hours.
The 5-Step Detection Pipeline
Economy bulk scan from each origin airport
Wingit calls the Travelpayouts fare database for round-trip economy fares from each of the 8 origin airports (DEL, BOM, BLR, MAA, HYD, CCU, COK, PNQ) to all available destinations simultaneously. This is a single bulk call returning hundreds of cached fares.
Build and update the benchmark database
Every returned fare is stored in a running history. For each origin-destination-month combination, Wingit maintains a price distribution table: min, Q1, median, Q3, and max. The Q1 price (25th percentile) is the primary benchmark. A route needs at least 3 historical data points before Q1 is used.
Flag fares 15%+ below benchmark
Any fare that is 15% or more below its route benchmark is flagged as a potential deal. The 15% threshold was chosen to filter out normal price noise (1–10% swings) while catching genuine fare drops.
Confirm with a second API call
Before inserting a deal, Wingit calls the Travelpayouts database again for that specific route and a plus-minus 7-day date window. If the fare is not within 20% of a returned fare in the confirmation call, it is silently dropped.
Insert, review, and alert subscribers
Confirmed deals land as 'pending' and are reviewed by an admin before approval. Once approved, every subscriber whose home airport matches the deal origin gets an email, push notification, WhatsApp message, and SMS (if opted in).
What Counts as a Deal vs. Normal Price Variation
Normal fare variation — not a deal
- ·5–10% swings that happen constantly as airlines adjust inventory
- ·Seasonal discounts that follow predictable patterns (monsoon off-peak, February lull)
- ·Advance purchase discounts that appear 6–12 months out then disappear
- ·Sale prices already embedded in the benchmark average
What Wingit flags as a deal
- ✓15%+ below the Q1 benchmark for that specific route and month
- ✓Fares that appear during a limited window — often 24–72 hours
- ✓Prices confirmed in a second database query, not just a stale first result
- ✓Economy and premium cabins tracked separately so benchmarks never mix
A fare that is Rs. 28,000 on a route where the benchmark is Rs. 38,000 is a 26% drop — flagged and alerted. A fare that is Rs. 34,000 on the same route is just normal pricing — ignored.
✓ The benchmark source matters
What You Get When a Deal Is Approved
Every Wingit deal alert includes: the route and dates, the deal price in INR, the benchmark price, the percentage below benchmark, nearby dates at similar prices (plus-minus 7 days), and a booking link to Aviasales where you can verify the fare and complete the booking.
The booking link is an affiliate link — Wingit earns a small commission if you book. This is the only revenue model. Every deal is free to every user with no paywalls, no tiers.
⚠ The price you see may not be the price you pay
Limitations to Know Before You Act on a Deal
3 Constraints You Should Understand
Prices are cached, not real-time
Travelpayouts data is typically 48 hours to 7 days old. The deal was real when Wingit scanned it. Major deal services globally — Going (Scott's Cheap Flights), Airfarewatchdog, Secret Flying — all work from cached airline data. This is an industry-wide constraint, not a Wingit-specific one.
No transit visa filter
Wingit does not know which airport your flight connects through, because Travelpayouts does not expose via-airports. A DEL–LHR deal routing through Istanbul will appear without a transit visa flag. Always check your itinerary's connecting airports against your visa eligibility before booking.
The confirmation call uses the same source
Both the primary scan and the price confirmation query the Travelpayouts database. This checks internal consistency, not live airline inventory. It is a quality filter, not a real-time inventory check. A stale fare that passes the initial scan will also pass confirmation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Three times per day: 5:30 AM, 12:30 PM, and 9:00 PM IST. These times were chosen to capture different airline fare-loading windows. Most significant fare drops are caught within a few hours of appearing.
Eight Indian departure airports: Delhi (DEL), Mumbai (BOM), Bengaluru (BLR), Chennai (MAA), Hyderabad (HYD), Kolkata (CCU), Kochi (COK), and Pune (PNQ). The destinations scanned include all routes returning fares in the Travelpayouts database for these origins.
The 15% threshold was set after observing that fares fluctuate by 5–12% routinely due to inventory changes, demand patterns, and normal airline pricing. A 10% threshold would generate constant false positives — fares that look like deals but are within normal price noise. 15% is the level where a fare represents a genuine departure from the route's pricing pattern.
Wingit earns affiliate commission through Travelpayouts when users click a deal link and complete a booking on Aviasales. The commission is paid by the airline or OTA, not added to your ticket price. This is the same model used by most flight deal newsletters globally.
The wishlist feature lets you save deal cards for routes you are interested in. When the next scan finds the same route at a new price, Wingit updates the wishlist item and sends a push notification if the price dropped 5% or more from your saved price.
Never miss a deal
See what deals are live right now.
Every deal on Wingit is free to every user. No tiers, no paywalls. If prices drop on routes from your airport, you'll know within hours.
Related: How to read a flight deal card · Current deals from Indian airports
