Fandetour

What's real here, and what isn't

• The airfares are real and live. Pulled from airline inventory through Duffel for specific dates — arrive the day before, leave the day after. Cheapest economy round trip, one connection maximum, chosen from up to 295 offers per game.
• Validated against hand-gathered prices. Omaha to Seattle came back at $409 against $408 written down independently months earlier in a real fan's spreadsheet.
• Room rates are government per-diem — mid-tier business lodging, by city and month, which does not move for a game weekend. We measured 30 real game weekends against matched control weekends to see whether that matters: it mostly does not. The median game weekend cost 0.99× a normal weekend in the same city. The exception is Green Bay — measured across all 9 Packers home games, game weekends there run 2.3–5.6× a normal weekend (median 4.2×), so those games carry a Hotel spike flag and their room figure is well understated. The five next-smallest markets tested clean.
• The Holiday tag is calendar, not price. It marks games in the Thanksgiving (Nov 25–29), Christmas (Dec 24–27) and New Year (Dec 30–Jan 3) travel windows — busy airports and family calendars, whatever the fare says. Some of those games are genuinely cheap to fly to; the price chips stay measured and say so.
• Ticket price is yours to set, because no free API will sell it to us — every route was tested and closed. One number applies to every game, so tickets set the scale but travel drives the ranking. Change it and the order stays put.
• Driving is priced wherever it's sane — within 6 hours each way, at 27 mpg. From Omaha that's Kansas City and Minneapolis only. KC has no commercial flights from Omaha at all; it's a drive or nothing.
• The DEAL chip is measured, not an opinion. A game earns it when its travel cost runs 15% or more below the median trip to that same city this season — so a saving in $587 Denver counts the same as one in $1,047 New York. 14 of 264 games qualify. PEAK WEEK is the same measure 30% the other way; 19 of the 28 flagged land on Dec 27, Nov 29 or Jan 3.
• The deal score ignores your ticket price and crew size. It is computed on travel cost for one traveller, on purpose — ticket price is a number you type, so letting it move the score would make the score an opinion. Cheapest-first ranking uses your real numbers; best-deal ranking uses the measured one.
• Two cities are priced so far — Omaha and Columbus. Every fare was bought for that specific origin; serving one city's board to a neighbour was tested across six pairs and does not hold, so each city gets its own run of live searches (about $7 and two hours).
• Eight NFL games are outside the United States and aren't priced — Melbourne, Rio, London twice, Paris, Madrid, Munich, Mexico City. They're shown, marked, and left out of the ranking. All 1,344 NHL games are priced, Canada included.
• Canadian rooms come from a different government. The seven Canadian NHL markets use Public Services and Procurement Canada's city accommodation limits, converted at the Bank of Canada rate. That is a maximum rather than an average, so it reads a little high — but airfare, not lodging, explains 96% of why a Canadian trip costs more.
• Deal scores never cross leagues. A game is measured against other trips to the same city in the same league. Pooling them would have tripled NFL badges for no reason beyond NHL trips to the same city costing more on average.
• Hotel rates for October onward use the prior fiscal year — the government hadn't published 2027 rates yet. Flagged per row in the table view.