Help Center

Click “Start Your Free Trial or Sign In” on the home page and sign in with Apple, Google, or email + password. The same button takes you back in if you already have an account — on a new phone or laptop, use it to sign in; you won’t be starting a second trial. You’ll be asked for your home airport(s), the teams you follow, and your preferences — airlines, time of day, bags, seats — so we can tailor recommendations.

On the team-setup screen, tap “+ Follow a club volleyball team” and start typing — we have most club volleyball teams pre-loaded, so “TAV 15” finds the club team. If your club isn’t there, add it as a custom club and team name — we won’t have its schedule, but you can add those trips yourself. College programs are under “+ Follow a college team” (“Texas Tech volleyball” finds the program). Follow as many teams as you like; you don’t tell us who is on them — we never ask for a player’s name. You can stop following a team any time from Your teams: its upcoming tournaments leave your board, and any trip you already confirmed or booked stays until you close it.

The same way a parent does. Tap “+ Follow a club volleyball team” (or “+ Follow a college team”), pick the team, and its tournaments load just as they do for a parent. There is no player to add — a team is followed by your household, not tied to anyone’s name.

Yes. Tap “+ Follow a college team,” pick the program, and Coach treats your games exactly like a parent’s tournaments.

We load schedules from each school’s own athletics site, and a few sites can’t be read yet. If your school doesn’t come up, email us with the school and the sport and we’ll add it.

Yes. On the Your teams step, tap Skip this step. You won’t be asked for a team or a home ZIP, and your Flight Board is just the trips you add — a vacation, a college visit, a family visit. You can follow a team later from your Account page. Already following a team? Remove it on Account → Your teams and tap Save.

We pull the tournament calendar from the registration systems tournament hosts use, so the bulk of qualifiers, regionals, and nationals show up automatically with the right dates and city once your club registers — we check for new registrations twice a week. If your tournament isn’t there (typically a smaller event, or a host that doesn’t publish its registrations), you can add it yourself with the name, dates, and host city. Once you add it, it becomes available for any other parent searching for the same tournament — so you’re helping the next family who comes looking. College schedules come from each school’s own published calendar, loaded for the season and refreshed as it goes. Kickoff and tip-off times usually get set about two weeks before a game; until then the game shows a date with no time.

Tap the + Add trip button on your Flight Board, the “Add a trip” row at the end of your list, or Add Trip in the menu. You’ll see two options: Tournament or Personal. For a tournament, search by name or city — we’ll prefill dates and destination from the tournament calendar. For a personal trip (a family vacation, a wedding, visiting grandparents), pick Personal and enter your own dates, origin, and destination — everything else works the same. Confirm travelers and we’ll start watching prices right away, usually within about ten seconds.

Yes. Airfare Coach watches any trip you add — spring break, a wedding, a holiday visit, a family vacation. The recommendation engine, daily monitoring, and text alerts work exactly the same way; you just pick “Personal” instead of “Tournament” on the Add Trip screen and enter your own dates.

Every game of the program you follow, home and away, is on the board, and your own zip code and drive-time setting decide which ones are flights. A game shows one date, the school and program (“Texas Tech University Women’s Volleyball”), and, once it’s set, the start time in the zone it’s played in — “6:00 PM CT”. When several games in one city share a flight, the card says “One flight · 3 matches” (or games).

For a game with no time yet, we start you the day before and bring you home the day after — the safe window. Once a time is set, an afternoon or evening game still starts you the day before unless your own departure window can get you there with time to spare; a morning game brings you home the same evening. These are only starting points: change the dates on the trip any time and Coach watches the dates you chose.

That’s our job. Every day we pull current prices on your specific routes, compare them to typical prices for that route at that point in the booking window, and tell you in plain English whether to buy now or wait. We’ll text you when something meaningful changes — we don’t send daily noise.

For each trip, Coach picks the specific outbound + return flight we think you should book and tells you why — nonstop vs. one-stop, time of day, how the price compares to typical for that route. You can tap Make this my pick on Coach’s Pick (or any of the other strong candidates Coach surfaces), and we’ll keep watching that specific itinerary and tell you the moment it’s a great price to buy.

No — and this is the question we get most. Coach checks every option on your route every single day, whether or not you’ve picked one. Picking a flight doesn’t narrow anything down; it just tells Coach which flight to measure everything else against, so we can give you a verdict on the exact itinerary you care about. If Coach finds something meaningfully cheaper than your pick, you’ll get a Switch & buy email — that email only exists because Coach kept looking.

Yes, anytime, and it costs you nothing. To swap it, tap Make this my pick on a different flight. To go back to having no pick at all, tap Remove pick on the flight you chose. Either way Coach keeps monitoring your trip exactly as before — nothing gets picked automatically in its place, and nothing is booked or cancelled. Making a flight your pick is never final.

Airlines reprice constantly — sometimes several times a day. The biggest drivers are how far out you are from departure (prices usually creep up as the trip approaches, with occasional dips), how many seats are left in each fare class (once the cheap inventory sells, the next tier kicks in), demand for that specific route on that specific day of week, holidays and events, and what competing airlines are doing on the same route. That’s exactly why we monitor every day. Instead of you checking prices a few times a week and guessing whether today is a good day, we watch your trip continuously and tell you when something actually meaningful happens.

No. When you tap “Book,” we open the airline’s own booking page with your exact flights pre-loaded. You complete the purchase on the airline’s site, with your own payment method, under their terms. We never touch your money or your itinerary.

We make a fresh request to confirm the airline’s direct booking link at the moment you click, because those links expire after about an hour. You’ll see a short interstitial page (“Taking you to United…”) while we resolve it, then we send you straight to the airline.

Occasionally an airline declines to give us a direct deep link. When that happens we send you to the airline’s own search page (united.com, southwest.com, aa.com, etc.) so you can pick the same flight with one extra step.

With “Seat selection & no change fees” on, the fares Coach prices have no change fee on every airline we show. If your team is out a day early, you can move your flight home to that day and pay only the difference in fare, if the new flight costs more. At the last minute, that difference can be large.

An earlier flight on the same day has its own rules:

• Southwest: free, if the earlier flight has an open seat.
• American: standby is free, and a confirmed seat starts at $60.
• Delta: standby is free, and a confirmed seat is $75.
• United: standby is free, and a confirmed seat may cost the difference in fare.
• Alaska: a confirmed seat is $75, with no difference in fare.
• JetBlue: $100 per person, with no difference in fare.
• Frontier: no fee on its bundles, but you pay any difference in fare.

Basic fares are different: most can’t be changed at all, and the rest charge a fee. You make the change in your airline’s app or on its site, and airlines change these rules, so check there before you switch.

Google Flights and Skyscanner are search engines — you go there, see today’s prices, and decide on your own whether this is a good price or whether to wait. Airfare Coach is a monitor and an advisor. You tell us your trip once. We watch the prices every day, learn the typical price band for your route at that point in the booking window, and tell you in plain English whether to buy now or wait — and we text you the moment something changes that affects the answer. We’re also personalized: every recommendation is filtered through your preferences — preferred and avoided airlines, the times you want to leave on each leg, nonstop vs. one-stop tolerance, bag count, seat selection — so the flights we surface are ones you’d actually book, not just the cheapest line on a search page. And we’re tournament-aware: we prefill dates from the tournament schedule and show the airline’s actual all-in checkout price for your group, not a per-person base fare.

Hopper is a booking app with a price predictor. You search a route and dates, tap “watch,” and it tells you whether to buy now or wait, then notifies you when it thinks the price is about to move — and when you’re ready, you buy the ticket through Hopper. It’s a fair tool for one trip you already have in mind, and its predictions draw on years of fares across every route. Airfare Coach starts a step earlier and goes a step further. We start from the schedule: pick your player’s team and every tournament lands on your Flight Board with the dates already set; tell us which ones you’re flying to and Coach watches them from then on — you don’t have to know when nationals are, work out the route, and set up a watch for each trip. We recommend a specific flight, not a route: Coach’s Pick is one outbound and one return that fit your preferences — your airlines, your time windows, nonstop or not, set once for how your family flies and adjusted for any one tournament that’s different — with a buy-or-wait call for today, re-checked every day, and a text when it changes. As of September 2026, Hopper’s prediction is about the lowest fare on the route for the day: you can filter out basic fares and connections, but its watch doesn’t take when you want to fly. Coach’s call is about the flights inside your window, on your airlines, with a seat and a bag. We price the whole family: the seat-included fare, times your travelers, plus the bags and seats you need, and before we say “buy” we confirm the airline’s own checkout total for your group — where Hopper shows a per-person fare. And when it’s time to book, you buy on the airline’s own site: the ticket is theirs, changes and refunds go through them, and we take nothing. There are no paid extras — no price locks, no protection plans. We’re $49 a year after a free trial; Hopper is free to use and earns on the bookings and the extras. On predictions, we won’t claim to be more accurate than anyone. What we do is show our work: every buy call Coach has made is graded against what you’d have paid booking on a random day, misses included, on the Coach’s track record page. If you’d rather watch one route yourself, Hopper does that well. If you’d rather have someone watching the whole season, that’s us.

Three reasons. First, we price the seat-included economy fare — Main Cabin, Choice, or whatever your airline calls the tier that lets you pick a seat and bring a carry-on. Google Flights leads with Basic Economy, which is cheaper but means no seat assignment, no carry-on, and you board last. For a family flying with a player and their gear, those aren’t the same flight, so we don’t price them as if they were. (Flying alone, or without gear? Turn off “Seat selection & no change fees” and carry-on on that trip and we price Basic fares too, and say what each one includes.) Second, we multiply by your traveler count and add the bag and seat fees your preferences require, so the number on screen is what the airline will actually charge at checkout. Google Flights shows the base per-person fare. Third, when both legs of a pair are selected, we pull the airline’s own all-in total — the same number you’d see if you clicked through. We refuse to show per-person estimates as “round-trip total” because that number can be off by 10–20% versus checkout.

Airlines don’t set one price for a flight. They sell a limited number of seats at each price, and when that group sells out the next seat costs more. That can happen any time of day — it isn’t tied to a nightly update. So the fare Coach showed you this morning can be gone by dinner, even though nothing about the flight changed.

We ran a study pulling the same routes six times a day. On about half the days, an airline’s cheapest fare on a route moved at some point during that day — typically by about $30. Roughly a third of days saw a swing of $20 or more.

Once a flight is already at a good price, waiting is a losing bet more often than a winning one. Looking at flights sitting at their best price of the past week, about 1 in 6 cost more the next day — typically $28 more per ticket — while only about 1 in 10 got cheaper. That’s the reason Coach waits to call BUY: by the time it does, the odds have already turned against holding out.

No, and we won’t pretend otherwise. Airlines don’t publish how many seats remain at a given price, and neither our data source nor anyone else’s can see it. We can explain how the pricing works and what we’ve measured; we can’t count the seats.

Our own price history, not an industry estimate. The within-day figures come from a study of 8 routes pulled six times daily between April 26 and July 7, 2026. The next-day figures come from 209,540 observations across the routes we track. Both are averages across many flights, not a prediction about your specific flight.

It depends on your routes and how much they move — and we’re honest that we can’t promise a specific number. What we can tell you is how we check: we score every buy recommendation against what a typical family would have paid, with the misses averaged in alongside the wins, so nothing gets flattered by leaving the bad calls out. The bigger your family and the more tournaments your team travels to, the more the math works in your favor. For the current numbers, updated weekly, our track record publishes what Coach’s buy calls actually average per ticket — counting the misses, not just the wins.

Two plans, both billed once a year. Base is $49 and watches up to five trips — a full season for over 90% of teams. Platinum is $99 and watches up to fifteen, for families with more than one player travelling or a team with a heavy tournament schedule.Both include the same thing on every trip: daily price monitoring, alerts when it’s time to buy, and end-of-season savings tracking. The difference is how many trips you can watch at once, not how well we watch them. The free tier lets you create an account, add one trip, and see prices and savings estimates — without paying, and paid plans start with a 14-day free trial.

Because watching a trip isn’t free for us. Every trip you add, we buy fresh prices for — every airline, every day, from the day you add it until the day you fly. That’s what makes the buy call trustworthy instead of a guess, and it’s a real cost per trip, every single day.We’d rather price it honestly than pretend it’s unlimited and quietly stop watching your trips closely. Five covers a full season for about nine families in ten — that number comes from a season of real club schedules, not a guess. If your family travels more than that, Platinum watches fifteen for $99 a year, and you can move up at any time from the Subscription page.

Yes, any time, from the Subscription page inside the app. Cancellation stops your subscription from renewing — your card won’t be charged again — and you keep paid features until the end of the period you already paid for. The free trial is your chance to decide if Airfare Coach is worth it; once you subscribe, the annual fee is non-refundable.

No. We only text or email when something actionable changes — a price moves meaningfully, a nonstop you were watching disappears, a recommendation flips from wait to buy. You can opt out of SMS or marketing email at any time without affecting your account.

When you book, reply to any of our text alerts with “BOOKED $X” (e.g. “BOOKED $4850”), or tap “Mark as booked” in the app. We’ll ask for your confirmation code so we can build you a one-tap link to manage your reservation on the airline’s site.

Yes. Anything you set during onboarding — airlines, time windows, bags, seats, home airports, travelers — can be changed in Settings. You can also override your defaults on a per-trip basis from Trip Settings.

Email support@airfarecoach.com and we’ll send you a copy of your data or delete your account, usually within a few business days. Details are in the Privacy Policy.