strml / swa-price-drop

Check for Southwest Airlines price drops for specific outbound and return flight numbers. If a drop in price is detected, a text message will be sent via Twilio.

Southwest Airlines Price Drop

What/Why?

The prices for Southwest Airlines flights change frequently. If you book a flight and the price drops, you can re-book the same flight and get a refund of the difference in dollars or points. Unfortunately this doesn't happen automatically so you must manually check southwest.com periodically to see if the prices for your booked flights have changed.

swa-price-drop will check for price drops on southwest.com for specific flights that you define in a configuration file. If a flight price falls below what you paid, you will receive a text message via Twilio with the news and you can re-book. Once this happens, the flight configuration will be re-written to check against the updated flight price.

For example, you paid $500 for a flight and set outboundPrice to 500 accordingly in your configuration file. The price falls to $450 and you receive a notification. The value of outboundPrice will now be set to 450 and you will receive a notification if it falls below this new price. Additionally, flights will be purged from the configuration file automatically once the outbound date is in the past.

Finally, both round trip and one-way flights are supported. See the sample YAML for an example.

Prerequisites

1. You should set up a free Twilio account if you don't already have one. You can still run swa-price-drop without Twilio and see a "price drop" log message generated but that's not very much fun compared to receiving a text message.

2. At the time of this writing, I'm using version 6.6.0 of node.js. Anything close to that will probably work.

Installation

$ cd swa-price-drop
$ npm install

Configuration

Hopefully these values are self explanatory. You must enter the correct code values for your origin and destination airport. The outboundPrice and returnPrice are the price thresholds that will be compared against when fetching price data from Southwest. If a flight falls below these configured prices, you will receive a notification.

flights:
  # round trip
  - outboundFlightNumber: 5030
    returnFlightNumber: 6592
    originAirport: AUS
    destinationAirport: MCO
    outboundDate: 3/11/2017
    returnDate: 3/18/2017
    adultPassengerCount: 1
    outboundPrice: 219
    returnPrice: 241
  # one way
  - outboundFlightNumber: 4288
    originAirport: AUS
    destinationAirport: MSY
    outboundDate: 2/17/2017
    adultPassengerCount: 1
    outboundPrice: 255
twilio:
  account_sid: [your twilio account_sid]
  auth_token: [your twilio auth_token]
  from: '[phone]'
  to: '[phone]'

Usage

$ node swa-price-drop.js --config ./swa-price-drop.yml --log ./swa-price-drop.log  --loglevel debug

Only --config is required. By default, a log file will be placed in $HOME/swa-price-drop.log with minimal logging at the info level. There is no console output.

Crontab

I am running this hourly via a cron job. You can adjust this to whatever schedule seems appropriate.

5 * * * * /usr/local/bin/node /Users/[username]/swa-price-drop/swa-price-drop.js --config /Users/[username]/swa-price-drop/swa-price-drop.yml

Disclaimer

This will break the moment southwest.com has a site redesign that invalidates the screen scraping logic. No guarantees on how fast I will be able to update if/when that happens. Pull requests are welcome!