The two numbers everyone leaves off a fare
Fare tables are everywhere. What they almost never tell you is how old the number is and what the nonstop would have cost instead — and those two facts decide whether the fare is useful.
This page prices ten US metros against Guatemala City (GUA) and carries both. It is the fare layer; our flights guide is the planning layer, and the direct flights tracker is the route layer. They do different jobs and do not repeat each other.
Why the fare age is on the table
The source is the Aviasales fare cache, read through the Travelpayouts Data Access API. Travelpayouts describes what that is, in its own documentation, without hedging:
“Attention, the data is transferred from the cache, so it is recommended to use them to generate static pages.”
“Data is transferred from the cache based on the user’s search history from Aviasales websites. The data is stored for 7 days for all types of queries.”
“It is not recommended to use expired prices (the approximate expiration date is given in the value of the
expires_atparameter).”
So a fare here is not a quote. It is the cheapest fare a real person found, on a specific day, on this route. That is genuinely useful — it is a floor that someone actually achieved — but it decays. A fare tagged 6.8 days old is at the far edge of a seven-day cache; a fare tagged 0.2 days old was found this morning.
The table colours the age for exactly that reason. Green under two days, amber to five, red beyond.
What the nonstop premium is really telling you
The premium column is the cheapest nonstop minus the cheapest fare of any kind. It is not a comfort tax — it is a routing tax, and it varies by more than a factor of five across these ten cities.
- Los Angeles: US$0. The cheapest LAX fare in the cache was a nonstop. When that happens there is no decision to make.
- Miami US$135, Dallas US$154. Hub cities with competing carriers. The premium is real but proportionate.
- Houston US$369, Washington US$371. Large premiums on already-high base fares.
- Chicago US$568 on a US$299 base. The nonstop costs nearly three times the connection. That is the row where the decision is actually interesting.
Decision rule that falls out of the data: the premium is worth paying when it is a small fraction of a high base fare and the connection is through a US immigration hub. It is hard to justify when it triples a cheap fare — which, on this pull, is Chicago specifically.
One hard limit: a blank nonstop cell means the cache had no nonstop fare, not that no nonstop route exists. The cache reflects what people searched. For the verified route map — which airline, how often, on what aircraft, what just started and what just stopped — go to direct flights to Guatemala. This page never infers a route from a fare.
The month window, and why it is not a season
The month endpoint returned one to four months per city, not twelve. That is a forward window of cached searches, not a seasonal average, and treating it as one would be the most natural mistake to make with this table.
Within that window on 20 September 2026:
| From | Cheapest month in cache | Dearest month in cache | Spread | Months in cache |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Los Angeles | Nov 2026, $281 | Oct 2026, $423 | $142 | 3 |
| Miami | Dec 2026, $267 | Nov 2026, $608 | $341 | 3 |
| New York | Nov 2026, $291 | Oct 2026, $579 | $288 | 4 |
| Houston | Mar 2027, $542 | Nov 2026, $646 | $104 | 2 |
| Chicago | Apr 2027, $300 | Oct 2026, $402 | $102 | 3 |
| Atlanta | Sep 2026, $625 | Sep 2026, $625 | $0 | 1 |
| Dallas | Oct 2026, $431 | Nov 2026, $658 | $227 | 2 |
| San Francisco | Dec 2026, $477 | Nov 2026, $729 | $253 | 2 |
| Washington Dulles | Oct 2026, $673 | Dec 2026, $1,250 | $577 | 2 |
| Las Vegas | Sep 2026, $387 | Nov 2026, $681 | $294 | 4 |
Atlanta has exactly one month in the cache, so it has no curve at all — its “cheapest month” and “dearest month” are the same row, and the honest reading is we have one month of data for Atlanta.
What the spreads do say, inside their own windows, is that the month you pick moves the price more than the city you leave from, for most of these routes. Washington’s window spans US$673 to US$1,250 — a US$577 swing on the same city pair. Miami’s spans US$267 to US$608. Against that, the entire cheapest-to-dearest gap across all ten cities was US$405.
Flying from a neighbouring city
The cheapest and dearest cities in this pull were Miami (US$266) and Washington Dulles (US$671) — a gap of US$405. Washington to New York alone was a US$381 difference.
That is a real arbitrage and it is also a trap. Positioning yourself to a cheaper departure city means two separate tickets, which means:
- no protection if the first leg is delayed and you miss the Guatemala flight;
- bags almost certainly re-checked, and a second bag fee on a low-cost carrier;
- the cost and time of the positioning flight itself, which the US$405 has to cover before it is a saving.
It works best when the positioning leg is short, cheap, the day before, and you were going to sleep somewhere anyway. It works worst as a same-day connection.
How to use this page in the week you actually book
- Find your city’s row and read the age badge first. A green badge means the number is close to current. A red badge means the cache is telling you what was available last week.
- Look at the premium column before the fare column. If the nonstop premium is under about a fifth of the base fare, the nonstop is usually the better buy for a Guatemala trip — GUA connections run through Miami, Houston and Panama City, where immigration queues eat short layovers.
- Check the month window, and note how many months it holds. Two months is a comparison, not a trend.
- Confirm at the airline. Every figure here is a cached floor. The booking links go to a live Aviasales search for the same city pair and dates so you can see what is actually on sale right now.
- Budget the bag separately. This page publishes no baggage fees because we did not verify any on 20 September 2026 — and a checked bag on a low-cost carrier can be a large fraction of a US$266 fare.
Once you land, the ground costs are on our flights guide — airport transfers, the Uber-versus-taxi arithmetic at La Aurora, and the domestic hop to Flores for Tikal. If you are travelling to support family rather than to sightsee, compare transfer rates before you go on our remittances hub, and current exchange rates will tell you what your dollars are worth on arrival.
Booking links on this page are affiliate links: if you book through them we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. No fare on this page is anything other than what the source feed returned.