Thanks to the generosity of two anonymous fans, we ran a giveaway for one United 20% and one United 10% off discount certificates on Friday.

We really appreciate the feedback that you all have provided — we would like to comment on one common enhancement request. There continues to be a lot interest in airline/alliance base filtering. As discussed previously, we do not think it is a feature set that we should invest time in building or categorizing the data.

Filtering is useful when there is a large data set. Our site does not have a lot of deals — on a typical day, we publish 7 deals. Deals we post are short lived in nature, meaning if you go past page 2 of the deals page, the probability of the deal still being active is small so filtering would include many expired deals. In addition, it would be hard for us to publish many more deals on a daily basis with our deal criterion of 6 cents per mile.

So what are the high level items we are working on this year?

• Deal finding related tech (that’s on the backend and nothing you guys see, but crucial to the overall success of the site )
• Migrating our email service off Feedburner so we can:
  • Provide city and real-time based email notification
  • Increase delivery reliability for one of our largest traffic sources
• Increasing our city base coverage – we made a significant investment in both time and resources launching ten new cities (Atlanta, Charlotte, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Orlando and San Diego) with Fare Deal Alert. We continue to assess new cities.

United Airlines’ Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner – Photo: InSapphoWeTrust, used under Creative Commons License (By 2.0)

As a reminder, the terms and conditions of the discount certificate are:

• Must book by March 30th, 2014 (March 28th for the 10% off discount certificate)
  
  
• Travel must be completed by March 30th, 2014 (March 28th for the 10% off discount certificate)
  
  
• For one passenger
• Only on United marketed and operated flights (this means no codeshares — e.g., a Lufthansa operated flight under United flight number)
• 20% off is only for the base fare — in actuality, it can be as little as 1% off the total ticket (such as yesterday’s deals to Copenhagen, Stockholm and Oslo where the base fare is between $40 – $70 or a $8 to $14 discount) to at max maybe 17% off (e.g., a $300 nonstop flight from New York to San Francisco would save about $50). The discount does not include taxes or carrier imposed surcharges like fuel.
  • The best bang for the buck will be Domestic, Carribbean, Central and South America and Asia. Europe and Africa would have small discounts as fuel surcharges to those markets are high.
• This discount may be used on following published fares: United First(R) (F,A) class, United Business(R) (J,C,D,Z) class and United Economy(R) (Y, B, M, E, U, H, Q, V, W, S, T, L, K) class fares.
  • The economy restriction only really affects super discounted domestic tickets — since there are two fare classes – G and N which this discount would not work.

Winners:

Without further ado, here are the two winners as selected by random.org. The first winner will receive the 20% off discount certificate and the second winner will receive the 10% off discount certificate.

Winner #1 – Entry #120 – Shannon on March 9, 2014 at 3:56 PM

Winner #2 – Entry #91 – wen on March 7, 2014 at 11:04 PM

Shannon and wen, we will be in touch with your discount certificates sometime today.

Update: We really screwed this one up — sleep deprivation can make for errors. Entry #91 is actually nathan. We will be in touch to send him something else. Apologies.

For complete transparency, here are all the entries:

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The Flight Deal does not sell travel products or services. We provide you with information about third-party travel suppliers’ offers, and link you to their sites. The information posted by The Flight Deal is valid at the time of publication. However, we have no control over the suppliers, and we therefore do not warrant or guarantee that their offers will not change or become unavailable. Nor are we responsible for their products, services or site content. Please see their sites for their most up-to-date offer information and all applicable terms and conditions.