This Subscription Service Will Send You Flight Deals for Weekend Getaways
Update: Some offers mentioned below are no longer available. View the current offers here.
At TPG, we post plenty of great flight deals that we find through our own searches, alerts and with the help of many different flight deal services. But one area of the market that appears to be underserved is domestic deals, especially with flights over weekend dates.
Today, the flight deal service Dollar Flight Club is launching Weekend Warrior Deals to help travelers with less flexibility and maybe limited vacation days an easier way to find cheap flights over the weekend.
If you're unfamiliar with Dollar Flight Club, it's a deal alert subscription service that sends out email and app notifications about cheap airfares to destinations around the world. Similar services include Scott's Cheap Flights or The Flight Deal.
Here's the way the new Weekend Warrior Deals will work: You'll set your departure airport and from there, Dollar Flight Club will notify you once a week with low-cost, round-trip fares with travel dates that fall over a weekend. All flights are nonstop and will either depart from your preferred airport on a Thursday or Friday and return on a Sunday or Monday.
The program is currently limited to domestic US departures only, and it's only available to Dollar Flight Club premium subscribers.
Dollar Flight Club has two products, one free, and then its premium membership, which costs $40 a year. Premium members enjoy four times the amount of deals as free subscribers, the ability to select your departure airport, Weekend Warrior deals and access to its partner perks, which include discounts to Huckberry, Acanela Expeditions and more. If you book or one or two flights after finding them through Dollar Flight Clubs notifications, you'll likely be getting your money's worth for the subscription.
We use Dollar Flight Club's deal alerts as a resource at The Points Guy, and we've found them to be a solid service that sends out plenty of international flight deals that are curated to just the departure airports you want. You'll sometimes have to play around with the dates given and many of the deals are on low-cost carriers, like Norwegian, so that's something to be aware of.
Related: The Best Credit Cards for Airfare Purchases
Just note that that there are other ways to find cheap flights without subscribing to a service, whether that's booking a flight with points and miles, setting your own Google Flights' alerts or following a website like Secret Flying. Still, Dollar Flight Club takes a lot of the legwork out of the process, and the Weekend Warrior Deals will likely be another valuable feature.
Another great way to maximize your savings is to purchase flights with a credit card that earns bonus points on airfare purchases. The Platinum Card® from American Express earns 5x on airfare booked directly with the airline and the Citi Prestige® Card offers 5x on airfare. Other great options are the Citi Premier® Card, Chase Sapphire Reserve and American Express® Gold Card, all of which earn 3x on airfare (3x on airfare booked directly with airlines or Amextravel.com for the Amex Gold).
The information for the Citi Prestige has been collected independently by The Points Guy. The card details on this page have not been reviewed or provided by the card issuer.
Booking with the Chase Sapphire Reserve's through Chase's own Ultimate Rewards booking portal is a great way to take advantage of cheap fares, since its points are worth 1.5 cents toward the cost of paid airfare. For instance, if you're notified by Dollar Flight Club of a $150 round-trip fare, you'll only need to use 10,000 Ultimate Rewards points to book the flights. And because it's technically a paid fare, you'll still earn redeemable and elite qualifying miles for the flight.
If you want to test the service before fully committing, Dollar Flight Club does offer a 14-day free trial of its premium membership. You can sign up for Dollar Flight Club Premium here.