Perhaps this is an example of the expenditure of vast amounts of ingenuity and energy in pursuit of minimal returns, but an on-line travel service that calls itself Yapta has begun offering its patrons instant, nay instantaneous, notification of changes in airfares. From there, Seattle-based Yapta can usually get customers a refund, it says. Yapta, which stands for Your Amazing Personal Travel Assistant, is slightly different than other on-line shopping services: it uses only the airlines' own websites, rather than any third-party search or aggregation site. More importantly, by tagging or linking to a specific fare for a specific routing, it tracks changes closely. 
After that, the notification is simple, though Yapta just announced it will tell its users of changes through that ubiquitous and often annoying online short messaging service, Twitter. Yapta's Jeff Pecor says this is the first offer of fare-change notification by twittering ('tweeting'). Some of the big OTAs offer fare-change refunds, but Yapta says that it can get you a voucher directly from the carrier.
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