kestrel actors › Hotel & flight prices

Flight Price Tracker — Cheapest Day to Fly & Airfare Alerts

A flight price tracker that reads Google Flights and returns the cheapest fare for every departure day in your window — one row per route and day, with the airline, stops, times and duration behind that price. Run it once to see the cheapest day to fly; schedule it and you have airfare price tracking you own, with a maxPrice line that turns any run into a flight price alert. No API key, no login, no browser.

Run Flight Price Tracker on Apify →

Flight price tracker pricing: what one row costs

Pay per event, one event per delivered fare row — at most one per route and departure day. Days on which Google lists nothing, days dropped by maxPrice, failed days and status rows are free, and nothing a spending limit refused is ever delivered.

Some worked sizes at the listed per-row price:

• One route, 7 days: 7 rows.
• One route, 30 days: 30 rows.
• Three routes, 30 days, daily for a month: 90 rows a run, about 2,700 a month.
• An alert run with maxPrice that finds nothing: 0 rows, $0 beyond a fraction of a cent of compute.

The verified runs behind this listing used $0.0002–$0.003 of platform compute each. Exact per-row pricing is on this page's pricing tab.

Flight price tracker input reference

Every field of Flight Price Tracker, straight from the actor's input schema.

Example input

{ "routes": ["JFK-LHR", "EWR-LHR"], "departDate": "14 days", "days": 30, "maxStops": "nonstop", "maxPrice": 400, "currency": "USD" }

{ "routes": ["LIS-LHR", "LIS-CDG"], "departDate": "tomorrow", "days": 30, "currency": "EUR", "market": "pt" }

Flight price tracker output fields

Two row types share one dataset: fare (one per route and departure day — that day's cheapest itinerary) and status (one per route; never charged).

Dataset views in the Apify Console: Overview, Cheapest fare by day, Run status.

Example row from a real run

Taken from the actor's README — this is the shape your dataset holds.

{
  "type": "fare", "route": "LIS-LHR", "origin": "LIS", "destination": "LHR", "trip": "one_way",
  "depart_date": "2026-10-05", "return_date": null, "seat": "economy", "adults": 1, "currency": "USD",
  "price": 127, "price_display": "127 US dollars", "round_trip_total": false,
  "airline": "Tap Air Portugal", "airlines": ["Tap Air Portugal"], "stops": 0,
  "depart_time": "8:00 PM", "arrive_time": "10:55 PM", "depart_day": "Monday, October 5", "arrive_day": "Monday, October 5",
  "duration": "2 hr 55 min", "duration_minutes": 175,
  "layovers": null, "layover_airports": null, "overnight_layover": false, "co2_kg": 123,
  "google_url": "https://www.google.com/travel/flights?tfs=...",
  "itineraries_seen": 12, "cheapest_in_window": true, "rank_in_window": 1,
  "fetched_at": "2026-08-29T06:25:14+00:00"
}

{
  "type": "status", "route": "LIS-LHR", "trip": "one_way", "seat": "economy", "currency": "USD",
  "depart_date": "2026-10-05", "return_date": null,
  "days_searched": 7, "fares": 7, "filtered": 0, "no_results": 0, "errors": 0,
  "cheapest": 127, "cheapest_date": "2026-10-05", "status": "ok", "error": null,
  "fetched_at": "2026-08-29T06:25:20+00:00"
}

Flight price tracker in Python, JavaScript and curl

Python

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("kestrel/flight-price-tracker").call(run_input={
    "routes": ["LIS-LHR"], "departDate": "30 days", "days": 14, "currency": "EUR",
})
for row in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    if row["type"] == "fare":
        print(row["rank_in_window"], row["depart_date"], row["price"], row["airline"], row["stops"])

JavaScript (Node)

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: '<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>' });
const run = await client.actor('kestrel/flight-price-tracker').call({
    routes: ['JFK-LHR'], departDate: '14 days', days: 21, tripLengthDays: 7, maxStops: 'nonstop',
});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
const best = items.find((i) => i.type === 'fare' && i.cheapest_in_window);
console.log(best.depart_date, best.price, best.airline);

curl

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/kestrel~flight-price-tracker/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"routes":["LIS-LHR"],"departDate":"30 days","days":7,"maxPrice":150,"currency":"EUR"}'

The same three calls are runnable files in the examples repository: examples/flight-price-tracker.py|.js|.sh.

Limits and honest notes

FAQ

Does it need a Google Flights API key?

No. There is no public Google Flights API to hold a key for, and this uses none. No login, no cookies, no browser — it builds the same tfs query parameter Google puts in its own URLs and reads the page Google returns. If you want a flight price tracking api shape, call it synchronously through Apify's API (the curl example above) and treat the rows as the response.

How do I find the cheapest day to fly on Google Flights?

Set departDate to the first day you could leave and days to how far you are flexible. The fare row with cheapest_in_window: true is the answer; rank_in_window orders the alternatives. The status row repeats it as cheapest and cheapest_date if you only want the headline. That is the cheapest day to fly google flights search, as one input and one column.

Can I get flight price history?

Not retroactively — Google does not publish history, and neither can this. What you can do is build it: schedule a daily run with a relative departDate, and every row lands with fetched_at. Two weeks of that is two weeks of history per route and departure day that is yours to keep and chart — a flight price calendar over time, not just across dates.

How do I set up Google Flights price alerts with it?

Set maxPrice, schedule the run, and send a message whenever the dataset contains a fare row. Because filtering happens before billing, a quiet day costs nothing. Google flights price alerts in their native form only cover the dates you saved; this covers every day of the window and any stop or cabin filter you set.

Does it do round trips?

Yes. tripLengthDays: 7 prices every day of the window as a week-long round trip; price is the total for both legs and round_trip_total is true. Round trip flight prices across a window are how most leisure searches actually look, and that is one input here.

What about nonstop-only, or business class?

maxStops: "nonstop" restricts every day's search to nonstop itineraries before the cheapest is picked, so the row is the cheapest nonstop that day — a nonstop flight search per day rather than one that a cheap connection would otherwise win. seat: "business" prices business class fares the same way; expect a different, smaller market than economy rather than a fixed multiple of it.

Why do prices differ from what I see in my browser?

Three usual reasons: your market differs from your browser's country, your currency differs, or the fare moved — airline pricing changes through the day. Set market and currency explicitly and re-run to compare like for like; each row carries the google_url that reproduces the exact search.

How many routes and days can one run track?

Up to 60 days per route, any number of routes; each route is searched in parallel across sessions. A 30-day window on five routes is 150 searches and, with no filter, 150 rows. Larger horizons are two runs with different departDate values.

Is it a scraper for Skyscanner or Kayak?

No — it reads Google Flights. Those sites and Google draw on largely the same carriers and online travel agents, so for airline ticket prices on a route the numbers move together and you get them from one source on one schedule. For the full itinerary list from the same source, the google flights scraper linked below is the sibling listing.

Is there a free tier?

Empty days, filtered days, failed days and status rows are always free, and Apify's free plan includes monthly platform credit you can spend on the paid rows. A run that finds nothing under your maxPrice costs nothing beyond a fraction of a cent of compute.

How to use Flight Price Tracker

• How to Find the Cheapest Day to Fly, as Data — Price every departure day in a window, rank them, and keep the history. One row per day with the airline, stops and duration attached — with Python.
• How to Track Competitor Prices Daily with n8n — A schedule, one HTTP node, a compare-with-yesterday code node and an alert. The workflow shape that turns any price scraper into a daily drop feed.
• How to Schedule a Scraper So It Never Goes Stale — Hard-coded dates rot the day after you set them. Relative date inputs keep a scheduled scraper meaning the same thing every morning — here is the grammar.

Ready-made runs you can open and start

Each one is a saved input on the Apify Store — open it, press Start, and it runs with the fields already filled in. All 163 across the suite.

Related scrapers

• Google Hotels Prices Scraper — hotel prices and every booking site's rate for a stay, for the same dates you just priced the fare for.
• Airbnb Scraper — Airbnb prices, availability calendars and occupancy.
• Airbnb Reviews Scraper — every guest review of an Airbnb listing.
• Agoda Reviews Scraper — Agoda hotel reviews with separate positives and negatives.

Run Flight Price Tracker

The actor lives on the Apify Store, where the pricing tab carries the live per-row price and the input form has every field above: apify.com/kestrel/flight-price-tracker