I’m on Skiplagged constantly because these two tools make it my fave spot for tracking flight prices:

1. How early should you buy a flight? Skiplagged gives you an idea by showing how far out fares on your route start to skyrocket. Here I can see that fares on a sample route don’t start to rise drastically in price until you’re 8-12 days out from a given departure date:

2. If you want to make an educated guess on whether your flight could drop in price, check out the data Skiplagged provides next to each flight in your search:

Because of the price history I guessed that the flight above would drop in price, since it was more than a month out from the flight, and I snagged the flight when it dropped into one of its $197 valleys.

Get to the news plz.

So this week I noticed Southwest Airlines flights appearing in Skiplagged searches. I don’t know how long this has been active, but I just noticed it.

Why does this matter?

Southwest has historically not allowed 3rd-party travel sites to sell its flights.

Important note: when you click to book the flight, it looks like Skiplagged’s own booking service that books the flight.

It looks like there’s a fee for some airlines when booking directly with Skiplagged, which is also news to me.

I believe this service fee depends on the airline, because some have a fee on Skiplagged and some don’t (Delta flights appear to charge a 3.5% fee, while American, United and Alaska don’t charge a fee).

I’ve never booked a flight directly through Skiplagged, so I have no idea how it works, or if Southwest’s standard T&Cs apply.

I really just use Skiplagged to compare/track fares and find “hidden-city” options, while booking my flights directly with airlines.

I checked the price of the same flight on Southwest.com, and it was available without the service fee, so $15 cheaper:

Is Skiplagged the only one offering Southwest flights?

I checked 10 of the major travel booking sites, and the only other one that displayed the prices on Southwest flights was Momondo, which linked to three smaller sites selling the flights:

Where does this leave us?

It’s hard to know.

We need a guinea pig to book one of these flights & see what happens.

More on Skiplagged here.

If you’ve ever booked a Southwest flight outside of Southwest.com, please comment below if you’re up for it.

If I’m missing something, please let me know!

*Update 2.21.2018:

I found another site where you can book Southwest flights: Kiwi.com

It’s on my list to try, but Kiwi seems cool because you can book multi-airline itineraries, and Kiwi has a guarantee that they’ll get you to your destination even in the case of delays/cancellations.

Also, as JT noted in his comment, you can book Southwest (or Allegiant) flights with Chase UR points by calling this number: 1-866-951-6592.