How we watch flight prices: percentiles, the flex window and honest confidence
A single number from a search box means nothing. A verdict needs a whole grid of dates and airports, its own history - and an honest admission of how confident we are.
With packages we compare the catalogue against the real price. With flights the trap is elsewhere: the price jumps with the date, the airport and who's flying. Here's the full process Voyscout uses to watch flight prices for a family - on real numbers from our scan as of 10 July 2026.
A family of 2 + 2 asks differently
All family prices are computed for a specific party of 2 adults + 2 children - and we ask the vendor for the whole family at once. Child fares differ from adult ones, so "adult price times four" is a made-up number nobody ever pays. We only show whole-family totals the search actually returned.
Why a flex window, not one date
A single date is a lottery. So we scan a whole grid: combinations of departure dates, stay lengths and airports within reach. Concretely for Bulgaria (direct flights, family 2 + 2), the 10 July scan priced 81 combinations of July-August dates and five airports (Prague, Vienna, Krakow, Katowice, Ostrava) to Burgas and Varna. The spread is enormous:
Return direct flights to Bulgaria for a family of 2 + 2 (whole-family totals), scan as of 10 July 2026. Indicative search prices - verify with the vendor.
And the same week can cost wildly different amounts per airport: for a 31 July departure returning 14 August, the scan saw a family total of 13,717 CZK from Katowice, but 32,465 CZK from Prague and 47,916 CZK from Vienna. That's why we look at the whole window and every reachable airport at once - shifting a few days or a hundred kilometres can cut the price in half.
The percentile says what "cheap" means
Every current price gets ranked inside that route's own history as a percentile: cheaper than what share of everything we've ever seen there. The 5,450 CZK above is the minimum of the entire grid - and it's exactly these extremes we treat most carefully. How percentiles and the trend become a verdict is covered in How we read price history.
Verified vs indicative - and verdict confidence
Flight prices come from search results, so they are indicative: the one that counts is what the vendor shows you at checkout. Extreme lows (promo fares, last remnant seats) can vanish within hours. That's why every verdict also carries a confidence level (high, medium, low): a short history, stale data, or a different travelling party than the history behind it all pull it down. We never promote shaky data into a confident "buy" - we'd rather admit we're still just watching. The full picture of the methodology lives on How Voyscout works.
The same process runs long-haul too: for spring Bali (April-May 2027, with a connection), the 10 July scan saw the cheapest family total at 68,539 CZK from Vienna against a grid median of 96,013 CZK. Different continent, same maths.
None of these numbers is a buy recommendation - they're one day's observations. Which is exactly why we collect them daily: once observations become a pattern, the verdict will say so. And when it isn't sure, it will say that too.
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