How I Actually Find Your Deals

The part that's automated

Every Monday morning, before most of Alberta has had its coffee, a script I built checks live prices across 15 Canadian airports — coast to coast, not just Edmonton and Calgary — looking for domestic flights under $350. It also checks a fixed list of direct international and business-class routes out of YEG and YYC, because those are the two Alberta hubs with real nonstop options worth featuring.

That part is genuinely automated. No one is manually refreshing a flight search site at 6am. The prices you see came from a real-time flight pricing API a few hours before your inbox got the email, and the code that runs it is mine — I wrote it, I maintain it, and when it has a bug, I'm the one who finds it.

The part I'll be straight with you about

Those little one-line quips under each deal — "Found a $310 flight to Lisbon this week!", that kind of thing — those are written by AI. Specifically, Claude writes a short, specific line for each route every week, and I tell it exactly what not to do: no clichés, no generic travel-blog filler, nothing that could've been written about literally any city.

Okay, but why did it feel like the same 3 flights every week?

Because it genuinely was. I went back and looked, and you're right: Vancouver–Victoria, Victoria–Calgary, and Edmonton–Calgary were showing up almost every single week. Here's why — and it's a dumber reason than I'd like to admit.

The system picked the single cheapest deal per city, every week, with basically no memory of what it picked last time. There was a "don't repeat" check in there, but it only looked back 2 days — and since the whole thing runs weekly, that check had already expired by the time Monday rolled around again. It was like having a rule that says "don't wear the same shirt twice in a row" when you only do laundry once a week. Technically a rule. Doing absolutely nothing.

And some routes — short regional hops like those three — are reliably cheap, week after week, for real structural reasons (short distance, more competition). So without anything stopping it, the system just kept handing them the gold medal every single time.

So no, those routes aren't banned — if Victoria–Calgary is still the best deal in the country in a few weeks, you'll see it again. It just won't be squatting on the list every single Monday anymore.

What's actually under my control

• Which cities and routes get searched at all (Alberta-first, always — that part never changes)
• The price ceilings that decide what counts as a real "deal" versus just a flight
• What gets fixed, rebuilt, or thrown out entirely when something isn't working — like this week
• The affiliate relationship behind the booking links, which I'd rather you read straight from the source than take my word for: it's all laid out on the About page and in the privacy policy

SkyTia is still a one-person project. The automation just means I spend my time deciding what's worth showing you, instead of manually checking 100+ flight combinations by hand every Monday morning. I'd rather use the time that way.