Sparkfare may earn a commission on flights booked through links on this site, at no extra cost to you. Read our disclosure.
A skeptical reader might reasonably wonder why clicking a deal doesn't just drop you directly onto the airline's own site. It's a fair question, and the honest answer has two parts.
We never process a booking or hold your payment details. "Book this fare" hands you off to the actual booking platform — the fare, the seat, the payment, all happen there, not on Sparkfare. The brief moment in between is ours; the transaction itself never is.
A tracking code attached to your click is how we can later confirm a fare actually got booked, and it's the same mechanism that lets us earn a commission on some bookings at no extra cost to you. It's also the one moment we can put a relevant Away Mode nudge in front of you before you're deep into someone else's checkout flow — see what happens after you click "Book this fare" for the full sequence.
We could route every click invisibly, with no interstitial and no explanation, and most visitors would never notice. We'd rather be upfront about why the moment exists at all than have it be a silent, unexplained pause — same instinct behind writing about why commissions don't influence rankings instead of just asserting it.