I get emails from a lot of different sites and apps, most of which (but not all!) are travel-related. Most of these I ignore, but a few catch my eye. One of these was from a new site called FareFetch.
Farefetch puts an interesting spin on traditional award booking. With traditional award booking, you typically pay $150 or so per person and the award booker uses your OWN miles to book flights. Because of the cost of the award booking, it’s typically done for international and/or premium cabin travel, since on domestic flights, there isn’t a ton of overhead for the award booker to get paid.
How Farefetch works
Farefetch is scheduled to go live in mid-June 2017 and people will primarily submit fare requests through their mobile apps (iPhone and Android apps scheduled). Someone looking for a fare will put in their parameters (origin, destination, class of service, number of passengers and how much they’re willing to pay) and submit it to Farefetch
Farefetch will send it out to their list of farefetchers (bookers) who then accept the fare, first come, first served. You book the flight and the fare fetcher keeps the difference.
For example, someone requests a flight from JFK-LAX on a certain date and says they’re willing to pay $500. You as a fare fetcher find the flight for $350. You keep $150
In theory, FareFetch told me you would also be able to book the flight with either points like Chase Ultimate Rewards, Citi ThankYou points or Barclaycard Arrival miles and keep the cash.
What happens if (when?) things go wrong?
My first question when I heard about Farefetch is what happens when things go wrong. As a fare fetcher, I don’t want to be on the hook for IRROPS, schedule changes or other problems for random people. Perhaps I’m jaded by the fact that as I write this post, I’m literally in the middle of a 4+ hour delay!
(SEE ALSO: 6 things to do if your flight is delayed AKA how not to ruin your dream trip)
According to FareFetch, they will work with travelers impacted by delays and schedule changes, but in all cases, the fare fetcher will keep their fee.
Is Farefetch too good to be true?
This seems to me to be a pretty sweet deal to be a fare fetcher, depending on how easy it is to “reserve” fares. In talking with some of the folks that are running FareFetch, they will penalize people that quickly “reserve” fares and then can’t deliver within a few hours, but it remains to be seen how exactly that will work. This could be an amazing opportunity if you really can use miles to book flights that have really high cash fares. I think the general public doesn’t realize how prevalent it is that a short-haul close-in flight that has a really high cash cost can be had for a relatively small amount of miles.
I wonder too if airlines themselves might crack down on fare fetchers using their miles to book tickets for 3rd party “strangers” and then getting compensated by FareFetch.
All in all, I have a healthy skepticism that this (at least the part where you can use your miles to book flights through FareFetch) is a sustainable model. But I’m willing to be proven wrong!
Signing up to be a fare booker
Currently anyone can sign up to be a farefetcher at http://www.farefetch.com/farefetchers
There are no fees to be a fare fetcher, and they are planning on having at least 1000 fare fetchers by the time the site goes live in mid-June 2017. For disclosure purposes, as far as I know I currently do not receive any bonus for anyone signing up through the above link.
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
What could be good about it, is it would be an avenue to earn lots of points by charging to cards with 3X points. I wouldn’t want to use my points, but I wouldn’t mind earning extra points.
What about tax implications here?
I’m cracking up. I’m at MEL reading this and the airport free WiFi is blocking the URL as “Malicious (global)”.
Any update on this?
Has anyone done it?
I actually reached out to them again a few weeks ago but got crickets… I’m assuming that means that there are delays and/or this will never happen
Thanks Dan for the response. Bummer, I hope it gets off the ground. It would be a fun job.
Keep us posted.
This sounds like it will ruin everything if airlines decide to crack down on this because I normally use my miles to book for family members.
I signed up to be a fare finder. Every single request I have gotten is an unrealistic low ball. Let me give some examples: LAX to YUL, only nonstop, will pay $225 for round-trip on 9/4/2017-9/6/2017. The cheapest fare meeting these requirements I could find was $447. IAH to TLV 1 stop ok, $270 per ticket on 10/17/2017. Cheapest found $869. PSP to JFK, 1 stop ok, $171 per ticket 9/6/2017 to 9/13/2017. Cheapest found $456. Now I realize using points is the way to make these work but even then, what kind of value am I getting for them? Much, much less than 1¢ each. If you think you can simply book the flights for people and make a profit on just the CC points, don’t even bother. To me, this has been pretty much a waste of time and feels like no one is serious, they just make some crazy offer without expecting anyone to take them up.
Also, all fare requests so far have been Econo. The economics might change with business/first requests but I think everyone using FareFetch right now is just trying to get deep deep discounts and the cheapest fare possible.
Yes I’ve seen one or two that were reasonable but most have been laughable. I may write a followup post about that as it’s getting quite out of hand. I’ve also reached out for comment from my contact at Farefetch but he has not yet responded
There is a follow up on this?
We wrote about it again a bit later, but since then I have not heard anything more from them and have no idea if they’re still in business.