Tuesday, Twin Cities.
Two fares this week. One is the cheapest thing leaving MSP right now. The other is from Thursday's lane, but it's too good to sit on until then.
🏔️ MSP → Denver (DEN) — $52 round-trip
Sat Jan 30 – Sat Feb 6 · Frontier, nonstop · 2 hrs 13 min
Fifty-two dollars. Round trip. Nonstop.
Google's own data says fares on this route usually bottom out at $55, so this is below the floor of what the route normally does — and it's a nonstop, not one of those cheap fares that sends you somewhere else first. We checked it again Monday afternoon on those exact dates and it's still there. A second Frontier nonstop on the same dates runs $70.
Late January is peak ski season, which normally pushes this route up, not down. A Frontier capacity dump is the likeliest explanation, and those don't last.
The catch, stated plainly: this is Frontier's Basic fare. No carry-on, no seat selection. A carry-on runs $35–60 depending on when you add it, so call it $90–110 all-in if you need one. For comparison, the cheapest nonstop on Southwest, United or Delta for the same week is $157. Personal item only and it's $52, full stop.
Book by: This week. Frontier fares this far below the floor get corrected fast.
🇩🇰 Bonus: MSP → Copenhagen (CPH) — $522 round-trip
Sat Mar 13 – Fri Mar 19 · Icelandair, 1 stop in Reykjavik · 10 hrs 20 min
Google's data puts the usual floor for this route at $590, and normally it runs well above that. $522 is $241 below what the route usually costs, and the routing is a good one: a 55-minute connection in Reykjavik, not a detour through three airports. The same fare shows up on two other March weeks too, including one that crosses into early April.
Icelandair also lets you stop over in Iceland for up to seven days on the way at no extra fare, so this can be two trips for one ticket if you have the time.
Book by: Within the week. We first saw it five days ago and it's held, but European spring fares tighten as March gets closer.
What we looked at and passed on
We check twenty routes out of MSP. Most weeks, most of them aren't worth your time. This week:
Nashville — $174. The cheapest option is a Frontier one-stop that takes eight hours for a two-hour flight. The nonstop on the same weekends is $218, which Google rates as typical. Not a deal this week.
New York — $268. A Sun Country nonstop, but that's squarely inside the normal $235–350 range for January. Good to know, not worth rushing.
Punta Cana — $506. Flagged as cheap, but it's a 17-hour Air Canada routing through Toronto. The next option is over $1,000.
We'd rather send you two real fares than six padded ones.
A correction from Thursday. We said Southwest's $208 Nashville fare was an all-in price because Southwest still includes two checked bags. It doesn't — Southwest started charging for checked bags last year, and the fare includes a carry-on only. We got that wrong. The fare was still good; our description of it wasn't.
The number that actually matters
Every flight-deal email you've ever gotten leads with a percentage. Thirty percent off. Save 24%.
Percentages are measured against whatever the algorithm guessed those dates should cost — which means a mediocre fare on an expensive week can look like a triumph, and a genuinely cheap fare on a cheap week can look boring.
The number we care about is where a fare sits against the floor that route actually hits over a year. Denver's floor is $55. This is $52. That's the whole argument.
Thursday we'll be back with the bigger trips. Europe has been unusually soft and we're watching a few routes that look close.
If you book the Denver fare, reply and tell us. We like knowing these land.
— MSP Departure
P.S. Forward this to someone in the Twin Cities. Three referrals gets you the MSP Travel Cheat Sheet — booking windows by route, when each region's fares drop, and the routes out of here nobody talks about.