Methodology: where our prices come from

What Vol Spot is, and what it is not

Vol Spot is a fare tracker for flights leaving Quebec City (YQB) and Montreal (YUL). It watches a set of destinations and flags the ones whose fare has dropped meaningfully below its usual price.

Vol Spot does not sell tickets, is not a travel agency, and handles no bookings. No flight payment goes through the site. When a fare is worth acting on, we send you to Google Flights to pick your exact dates and book with the airline or agency of your choice.

Nothing on the site is personalized advice. The visa and health sections are general orientation for a Canadian passport on a short tourist trip, not legal or medical guidance.

Where the fares come from

Vol Spot collects no data of its own. We buy our fares from a commercial search API provider, on a paid plan. Vol Spot queries neither carrier websites nor travel agency sites directly, and has no privileged access to reservation systems.

The fares that provider returns are the ones Google Flights publicly displays for the same search. That is why the booking link on every deal sends you there: you can check any price at the source, without going through us.

An automated sweep runs once a day. It queries eight world regions for each of the two departure airports, then keeps, for every destination it finds, the lowest round-trip fare returned that day.

All amounts are in Canadian dollars, round trip, one adult, economy class, taxes and mandatory fees included. Destinations above $2,500 are neither tracked nor shown: at that price the idea of a deal stops meaning much from Quebec City.

What the displayed fare actually represents

The displayed fare is a minimum across a flexible date window. It corresponds to the best date combination found in that window at the time of the sweep, rather than to a flight on dates of your choosing.

The fare is real at the time we record it: someone could buy it at that price. It stays tied to specific dates, often not the ones that suit you, and seats at that price are limited. A fare that sells out a few hours after the sweep happens regularly.

Always confirm the live price on Google Flights before booking. The calendar on each destination page exists for exactly this: seeing which dates in the window actually carry the low fare.

How the discount is calculated

Every route has a usual price, or baseline, built from the historical price data the same provider returns for that airport pair. The discount shown is simply the gap between the fare we spotted and that usual price, expressed as a percentage.

Those baselines are refreshed on rotation, each one revalidated within 84 days at the latest. A brand new route has no baseline yet: until it does, it appears with its price but no percentage, rather than with an invented discount.

A percentage compares a route to itself, never to another route. 30% below usual to Tokyo and 30% below usual to Fort Lauderdale are equally good deals in their own class, even though the dollar amounts have nothing in common.

Our own fare history

On every sweep, the best fare of the day is kept for each route, one point per calendar day. It is the only dataset on the site that is genuinely ours, and it feeds the chart and the "what this route usually costs" section on every destination page.

When a page says we have recorded a fare on 40 separate days, that means 40 sweep days on which this route came back with a price. Routes we have tracked for fewer than ten days stay out of search engine indexes unless the page carries hand-written content of its own, because otherwise we have nothing solid to say about them yet.

The count of days "cheaper than today" counts observed days whose fare beat the one showing right now. We do not count days below the usual price: the sweep specifically looks for fares below average, so that count would read "40 of 40" almost every time.

What we refuse to display

We do not show the airline, the exact duration, or the exact number of stops for a fare we did not price ourselves. Presenting those details for a flight we have not verified would give a false impression of precision.

Stops are therefore presented as an optimistic minimum: "nonstop" means we have seen a direct flight on this route before, not that today's fare is one.

We never invent a price to fill a gap. A destination with no valid fare on the last sweep is dropped from the results rather than shown with a stale value.

Update frequency

The sweep runs once a day and the site is rebuilt behind it, so page prices and shared link previews match the latest sweep.

Every deal states when it was checked. An airfare can move several times within the same day, so treat the check date as part of the price.

When we spot an obvious error between sweeps, we can correct a price by hand. The correction is timestamped and automatically yields to the next sweep: it cannot survive fresher data.

Known limits

Small routes out of Quebec City are swept less often in practice, because they do not surface in the results every day. Their history is therefore shorter and patchier than that of a large route out of Montreal.

We do not track fixed-date fares and offer no tracking for one specific flight. Google Flights already provides that tracking for free, directly at the source.

Our destination list is not exhaustive. It comes from what the regional sweep surfaces, and some destinations Quebec travellers rarely book are deliberately excluded.

Prices are for one adult. The site lets you open a search for two or more passengers, but the displayed fare stays the per-person fare recorded at sweep time.

How Vol Spot makes money

Two sources: advertising shown on the site, and an optional Premium subscription that removes ads and lets you track more routes at once. The site stays fully usable and free without an account.

We earn no commission on flights. The booking link points to Google Flights with no affiliate code, and we make nothing if you book. A per-booking commission would give us a direct interest in inflating the discounts we show, which we would rather avoid.

If we ever add an affiliate link, for a hotel or insurance for example, it will be marked as sponsored and disclosed in our legal pages.

Trademarks and affiliation

Vol Spot is an independent service. We have no relationship with Google, or with any airline, travel agency or tour operator, and nobody pays us to push a destination.

Google and Google Flights are trademarks of Google LLC. We name them only to describe where our data comes from and where to go check a fare. Vol Spot is not sponsored by, endorsed by, or approved by Google.

Carrier and airport names appearing on the site belong to their respective owners and are used only to identify a route.

Reporting an error

If a price looks wrong to you, email [email protected] with the destination and the check date shown. We verify and correct.

Destination and route suggestions are welcome at the same address.