Ctrip's FareAlert making spontaneous vacations easier, cheaper

Well shoot! If there's anything we're a fan of it's impromptu vacations, and now Ctrip.com's got a new FareAlert system in place to help us do fulfill our "adventure for the weekend" fantasies. Go to farealert.english.ctrip.com, enter your criteria - where you want to go, around when you'd like to go, and how much you would pay - and you'll get an SMS or an email if and when your criteria has been matched.

Especially fun is the “Weekend Search” function, that lets you FareAlert for all the weekends in a month. We're currently crossing our fingers for some ridiculous price that will make it worth it for us to spontaneously run off to Kunming. You can enter up to five fare alerts at a time - what are your top five places you'd like to go?

Also a neat feature (and one that appeals to our obsessive need to graph things) is the ability to look at fare trends from the last couple of years. Check out the Shanghai to Hong Kong prices in 2005! We remember flights being more expensive back then, but who knew they'd dropped that much?