This is a guest post written by Matt Gamboa.

It always happens… you wait for the best price on a plane ticket to maximize your savings, only to find that a few days later, the price drops even more. What can you do? Don’t most tickets say “non-refundable” when you’re reading the terms of sale at the final confirmation screen? What you might not have known is that quite a few airlines offer some form of credit if the price of your travel drops after purchase. The fine print varies per airline, but a Seattle startup is looking to exploit that policy and empower the user with the information. The company is called Yapta.

Yapta is an airline travel site whose main feature is to track airline ticket prices and provide alerts. You look for a specific itinerary by searching on the site (powered by Kayak), and set up alerts to let you know via email when that ticket falls within your budget. It’s very useful if you don’t want to spend more than a specific amount on a ticket, or if you’re just waiting for the best time to travel.

The other, quite unique service Yapta provides is the ability to tell you if your ticket is eligible for a refund because the price dropped after you bought it. A lot of airlines have a policy on refunding travel credit in the event that the ticket you purchased drops. It varies, but generally if the ticket drops below $150, you’re eligible. Yapta will monitor the ticket while you just watch your email account for notifications!

The site was launched in 2007, and they say there have been more than $300 million in savings. Travel is already expensive, you should be obligated to save as much as possible. Yapta helps us take a huge step in getting that lowest price.

How to Pay Less for Travel With Yapta

Farecast.com is the first airfare prediction website. They help online travel shoppers save money by answering the question; should you buy now or wait? In their beta version, they now offer airfare predictions from over 75 U.S. departure cities to top domestic destinations. And from a Gnomedexer blog post (thanks Derek), here’s a bulletpointed synopsis:

• When should you buy airfares, and where?
• Predictive model of what’s happening to airfares in the past and future
• Based on a CompSci model from UW
• Designed to be quick and responsive
• Lots of filtering and sorting
• Updated every night
• Lots of traffic driven in by prominent bloggers
• Blog interest drove interest by mainstream media
• “Bloggers I’m telling you, we kick ass.” – Chris

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