An independent fare research desk in Des Moines, Iowa

How we got here

The desk was registered as CWS TRAVEL LLC in Iowa in April 2026 by a small team of former airline pricing analysts and operations dispatchers. The "CWS" stands for Customer-first Wheels-up Search. The framing matters: most flight meta-search sites optimize for clicks on the cheapest fare, not for whether a traveler actually shows up on time at the other end. We thought a U.S. fare research desk could do better by pairing the fare number with the carrier's recent on-time performance on that exact route.

Three things we measure on every fare

1. Published price. Base fare plus government taxes — exactly what the carrier itself shows at checkout.
2. On-time score (last 90 days). Pulled from BTS A-14 filings, refreshed monthly. A fare from a carrier with an 88 % on-time record is materially better than the same fare from a carrier hitting 71 %, and the price doesn't show that.
3. Bag, change, cancel context. Surfaced beside the fare so a $39 ULCC ticket doesn't read better than a $79 legacy fare with bag included.

How we get paid

Two sources, both transparent: a flat referral fee from booking partners when a traveler books through their checkout (we get paid the same regardless of which booking partner is chosen), and an editorial sponsorship from a small handful of U.S. airlines that pays for the on-time data feeds. Neither source affects the price you see — we publish the same fare regardless of which carrier or partner is in the row.

What the team works on day-to-day

• Refreshing fare buckets on a 30-minute cadence for ~480 U.S. domestic routes.
• Updating bag/change/cancel rules monthly when carriers publish revisions.
• Hand-curating the destination pages so the monthly fare baseline is realistic, not synthesized.
• Answering callbacks from the contact wizard inside the window the traveler picked.