Why some destinations always make the board, deal or not
Not every destination on Sparkfare is held to the same bar. That's not inconsistency — it's a deliberate reflection of how differently each destination's fares actually behave. Every one of our 40 destinations sits in one of four groups. Three of them are judged by the same rule — a fare has to fall below the route's own 30-day median by more than twice its usual price swing — and the fourth is never judged against a price bar at all.
Long-haul routes
Destinations like Bali, Tokyo, and Cape Town swing further on their own than a short domestic hop does, simply because long-haul fares have more room to move. That is exactly what the swing measure is for: the more a route normally bounces around, the further below its median a fare has to fall to earn a deal badge, so a route like this usually needs a bigger drop than a steadier one.
Routes with a big shoulder-season drop
Destinations like Lisbon, Athens, and Tulum have pricing that falls off a real cliff between peak and shoulder season. A fare that falls well below the route's own median, by more than twice its usual swing, is a genuinely meaningful signal here.
Low-cost-carrier routes
Destinations like Prague and Budapest, where low-cost-carrier routing quirks occasionally open real fare arbitrage. Same rule as the other two judged groups, for a different underlying reason.
Featured destinations — no threshold, always shown
Destinations like Marrakech and Cusco are always shown on the board whenever we have data for them, regardless of price, and never carry a "deal" badge. This is a curation choice, not a claim about savings — these are destinations worth surfacing on their own merits, and we'd rather be upfront that "featured" and "deal" mean two different things than let a featured destination borrow the credibility of a badge it never actually earned.
Full calculation details for the rule the first three groups share are in how we rank deals.