Home > How the Savvy Score Works
The Savvy Score is a 0–100 rating that tells you whether today's airfare from Australia to Asia is genuinely a good deal — book now, keep watching, or wait. No sales gimmicks, no "hurry, prices rising!" pressure. Just a straight read on the fare in front of you, updated every morning. Here's exactly how we work it out, in plain English.
It's a single number from 0 to 100 attached to the current fare on each route we track. A high score means today's fare is genuinely low for that route; a low score means it's overpriced. Because we recalculate it every morning, it always reflects the latest fares — not last week's.
Four ideas do the work:
We track real fares, every day. Each morning we pull live return economy fares on flights from Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide to Bali, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, South Korea, the Philippines and Malaysia. Full-service and budget carriers are scored separately, so we never make a budget one-stop look like a bargain against full-service nonstops.
We compare each fare against that route's own history. The score isn't a universal "is this cheap?" — it's "is this cheap for this route?" A $700 fare is a steal to Tokyo and ordinary to Bali. We measure today's fare against the recent spread of fares we've logged for the same route.
We use the median, not the average. The median — the middle fare — is what we score against, because a couple of freak $2,000 fares would drag an average around and make everything else look cheap. The median reflects what you'd realistically expect to pay.
We account for how far out you're booking. Fares behave very differently three months out versus two weeks out, so we compare like with like — today's fare against the history of fares booked a similar distance ahead, not against last-minute ones.
That comparison is mapped onto the 0–100 scale and sorted into one of six tiers.
Every morning we take automated snapshots of live return fares on the Australia–Asia routes we track across 8 destinations — economy, return, one adult, the same fares you'd see if you searched yourself. Each snapshot records the airline, the price, the number of stops, and how far out from departure it was seen.
We've logged well over 200,000 fares since we started in March 2026, and the number grows every day. Nothing is hand-picked and nothing is adjusted after it's recorded — every Savvy Score is computed from those raw snapshots, measured against the route's own history.
This methodology — like every guide on this site — is written and maintained by Nathaniel, SavvyFlyer's founder.
We don't score "a flight to Tokyo" — we score a specific trip, a specific distance ahead. For every route we hold a set of forward-looking departure windows: roughly two weeks, one month, six weeks, two months and three months out. Each is scored on its own, against the history of fares booked at that same distance ahead, because a fare three months away and a fare two weeks away are different products sold to different people. That is why a single route can show Rare in one window and Overpriced in another on the same morning — both are true, of different trips.
The "best window" on a route card is simply the highest-scoring of those six that has enough comparable history behind it. When a window doesn't — a new route, or a stretch where we couldn't collect fares — we mark it Insufficient Data and show no score at all. We would rather show you a blank than a confident number built on four data points.
85–100 — 🔥 Rare — Book Now: Among the lowest fares we've seen for this route. Grab it.
75–84 — ⚡ Hot — Almost Gone: A strong price with a good chance it won't last.
65–74 — 🚀 Strong — Don't Miss: Clearly better than typical. Worth booking.
55–64 — 👀 Dropping — Below typical, still drifting: Cheaper than this route's usual, though it can move either way from here.
45–54 — ⏳ Stable — Around typical: The ordinary price for this route. Nothing unusual either way.
0–44 — ❌ Overpriced — Above typical: Dearer than usual for this route. Whether it falls from here is not something the score can tell you.
It's not a prediction. We don't claim to know the future. The score tells you how today's fare compares to what this route normally costs — it is not a promise that fares will, or won't, fall.
It's not a universal price rank. A high score doesn't mean the fare is cheap in absolute dollars — it means it's cheap for that route. Tokyo will always cost more than Bali.
It's not influenced by commission. The score is calculated purely from fare data — and our Book button opens Google Flights, which pays us nothing at all. Even if that ever changes, commission will never touch the score: a genuinely low fare scores high whether or not we earn a cent.
It's not inventory. We score fares, not seats. A high score says today's advertised price is low for that route — it does not tell you how many seats are left at it, and it is not a guarantee the fare will still be there when you click through. Availability belongs to the airline; we only ever report what the fare was when we checked it, and every card carries the timestamp to prove it.
It's not a booking site. We don't sell flights. We tell you when to buy; you book directly with the airline or a partner.
Airlines and online travel agents hold far more pricing information than the traveller ever sees, which is why a "sale" is so often just an ordinary fare with marketing attached. SavvyFlyer exists to hand some of that intelligence back — to turn "is this a good price?" from a guess into a number you can trust.
Pick your destination and check today's live Savvy Score. Or read one of our data-backed booking guides — each one shows how the score plays out on a real route.
In one line: The Savvy Score is a 0–100 rating, updated every morning, that compares today's Australia-to-Asia airfare against the median of that route's own recent fares at a similar booking window — so you can see whether today's fare is genuinely cheap for that route, or just ordinary.
