The price record
Each watched stay is snapshotted once a day against a fixed “shape” — the same room type, board basis, refundability and occupancy — so a change in price is a real change, not a different room. We store the cost in the original currency, the normalised pound value, and that day’s exchange rate separately, which lets us tell a genuine rate move apart from a currency move.
Flights
We track the standard scheduled route for each destination on the same daily cadence. Operator charter flights (Jet2, TUI) are not sold outside their packages and are not in flight-search systems, so the do-it-yourself flight we price is always the best available scheduled carrier — the route you would actually book yourself.
The package-vs-DIY comparison
The do-it-yourself total is the hotel (booked through us) plus the cheapest suitable scheduled flights plus a return transfer estimate for your party. We compare it to the operator package for the same trip and state the difference plainly, always noting that the package includes ATOL protection and transfers and the DIY route generally does not.
What we don’t claim yet
We report the trajectory so far — how a price has moved since we started watching it — and are explicit about how much data sits behind it. We do not issue a confident “buy now or wait” prediction until a stay has enough history to earn one. Showing the data honestly matters more than sounding certain.