To have a chance at getting these cheap fares, we're going to need to know in nearly real time when they happen. To accomplish this, we'll use a service called If This Then That (IFTTT). This free service allows you to connect a huge number of services with a series of triggers and actions. Want to save as many pictures as you like on Instagram to your iPhone photos? Want to get an email every time a particular person tweets? Want your Facebook updates posted to Twitter? IFTTT can do all of this. Go through the following steps:

1. The first step is to sign up for an account at http://www.ifttt.com.
2. Once you've done that, you'll need to sign up for the Maker channel, https://ifttt.com/maker_webhooks, and the SMS channel, https://ifttt.com/sms.
3. Maker allows you to create IFTTT recipes by sending and receiving HTTP requests.
4. Once you've created an account and activated the Maker and SMS channels, click My Applets from the home page, and then click New Applet:

5. Then, click on this, as shown in the following screenshot:

6. Then, search for webhooks and click Receive a web request:

7. Then, we'll create an event called cheap_fares:

8. Once you fill out the event name, click Create trigger. Next, we'll set up the +that:

9. Click that, and then search for SMS and select it:

Then, choose Send me an SMS:

10. After that, we'll customize our message:

Once this is complete, click on Finish to wrap-up the setup:

To test the setup, go to http://www.ifttt.com/maker_webhooks and click on Settings. You should see your account information that includes a URL with a secret key. Copy and paste that URL into your browser. It should have a form with your secret key and a place to fill in the values that correspond to your city and price.

Fill in cheap_fares for event, and place the city and fare into value1 and value2, respectively:

Finally, click Test It, and you should receive a text message in just a few seconds.

Now that we have all the pieces in place, it's time to pull it all together into a single script that will monitor fares 24/7.