A New Flight Search Engine Says It Can Save You Money by Finding Pricing Loopholes

There’s a new site called Airglitch, and it takes a different approach to the same problem that every other flight search tries to solve. Instead of just pricing a flight from A to B, it hunts for cheaper ways to book the same trip.

Sometimes that means adding a flight you don’t intend to take. Sometimes it means booking a city past your real destination. Airglitch does the math, and you decide whether the trade-off is worth it.

There are free and paid options, and the website will suggest booking strategies you may not have considered to save money.

How does Airglitch work, and what’s the cost? Let’s take a closer look.

What Airglitch Does and Why It’s Different

Flight searches typically show you the cheapest fare from your origin to your destination. Airglitch searches sideways. It looks at throwaway ticketing, hidden-city routings, open-jaws, and combined multi-trip bookings, then surfaces the ones that beat the plain fare on your travel dates.

Each strategy has a name on the site, a success rate, a typical savings range, and a note on whether you can check a bag:

• Spare return: A round-trip that costs less than the one-way. You fly the outbound and skip the return.
• Spare multi-city: A multi-city ticket with a later second journey tacked on. The extra leg is optional; drop it or reschedule as you like.
• Hidden city: Book a city past your destination and get off at the layover. Carry-on only, and there are some risks to using this with your preferred airline.
• Hidden return: The same idea applied to a round-trip, done as a multi-city trip with a hidden final leg.
• Multisearch: Combines 2 or more upcoming trips into 1 search, hunting for nested or back-to-back tickets that price below the sum of the parts.

There’s an important distinction that applies to checked bags: The “spare” strategies leave nothing skipped mid-ticket, so a checked bag is fine and the outbound is safe. The “hidden” strategies do skip a segment, which is why the site tells you to travel carry-on only and warns against overusing them.

Real Examples From a NYC-to-Rome Search

Airglitch publishes worked examples on its route pages, and the numbers are concrete. Here are some recent examples of flights between New York and Rome:

• Icelandair economy, JFK to FCO on June 19, priced as a one-way at $1,298. Booked as a spare-return round-trip, you don’t fly back, it drops to $1,097. That’s $201 off.
• American Airlines JFK-FCO on June 30 fell from $919 to $788 with the same spare-return trick, saving $131.
• ITA Airways nonstop JFK-FCO on July 3 cost $691 one-way. Booked as a hidden-city ticket routed through Rome to London, it dropped to $491. That’s $200 savings on a direct flight.
• Another ITA nonstop in May went from $649 to $425 with the same hidden-city play, providing 35% savings.
• Flying TAP Portugal JFK-FCO on June 18 listed at $1,053, but pairing it with a spare multi-city leg out of Rome brought it down to $755, saving $298.

Airglitch says typical savings on this route are between 5% and 35%, depending on the method, with hidden-city and spare-return producing the widest ranges.

Potential Feature Additions

Airglitch is still in its early stages, and more features may launch in the future.

According to an Airglitch spokesperson, ideas under consideration include mixed-cabin searches, allowing users to accept itineraries that have a certain percentage of the trip in a premium cabin but include a short flight in economy. Think Boston to Philadelphia in economy before a flight to Paris in business class. Accepting a short flight in economy could reduce the flight cost, rather than booking the entire trip in the front cabin.

Free vs. Plus Plan: What You Get for $9

Airglitch offers both free and paid plans.

The free plan provides access to both one-way and round-trip searches, but only for economy flights. There are usage caps on this plan, though free users can access the feed of deals recently found by other members. Everything more sophisticated — premium cabins, multi-city, nested tickets, unlimited searching — requires the Plus plan, which costs $9 a month.

Here’s a comparison of the plans and their features:

If you fly economy on a few simple round-trips a year, the free plan probably covers you. If you book premium cabins, string multiple trips together, or want the nested-ticket math handled for you, the $9 monthly membership could pay off when Airglitch finds savings on your behalf.

At $9 per month, the annual cost of Airglitch is $108. However, it’s possible to pause your membership when you’re not using it, paying only for the months when you need to book airfare.

Final Thoughts

We’ve had hidden-city and skiplagging tools before, but Airglitch is the first to combine the whole family of throwaway and open-jaw booking tricks into a single search and prices each option side by side.

The Plus plan is cheap enough that anyone booking transatlantic business class should run a single search and see what pops. If it saves you $200 on the first booking, the annual membership cost could be more than justified.