Some flight tools will tell you a price is likely to drop, or advise you to wait. Sparkfare never does either. Every number on the board describes what already happened — today's price against this route's own real trailing history — never a forecast of what happens next.
We looked at this directly rather than assuming our approach was unique. Hopper frames its claim as an explicit percentile — "better than 95% of prices we've seen in this market" — a real historical comparison, not a prediction, but still a broader market-wide benchmark than a single route's own history. Expedia flags fares 20%+ below an ML-estimated "typical price," computed across roughly 2 million flights analyzed daily — genuinely a modeled estimate, not a straight historical average. Both are legitimate approaches. Neither is what we do.
A prediction is a claim about the future, and future claims can be wrong in ways a straight historical comparison can't. "This route's cheapest fare today is 20% below its own 30-day average" is a statement about the past — checkable, and either true or false the moment it's made. "This price is likely to drop" is a bet, however well-informed. We'd rather ship the first kind of claim than the second, even though the second is arguably more directly useful for deciding whether to wait.
A "deal" badge on Sparkfare has never meant "this price is as low as it will ever get" — it means "this price is genuinely below what this route has actually cost over the past month." Whether it goes lower still is a real, open question we simply don't claim to answer. Full mechanics in how we rank deals.