A family of four looking to fly from Salt Lake City to Honolulu would typically need to spend around $3,020 — or $755 per ticket — to get there and back, according to a Salt Lake Tribune analysis of airfares.

But if this family’s itinerary was flexible — if, for example, they were searching last January and could travel between February and May — they could have scored four tickets that would total around $1,100, or $284 each for a round trip to Honolulu on Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines.

That’s an actual deal that Utah-based Flights From Home sent to its subscribers earlier this year. But this family would have needed to act fast. The company predicted that these cheap fares, sent out on Jan. 20, would last less than 24 hours.

Experienced travelers know that airfares can fluctuate greatly over time, based on factors that include consumer and business travelers’ demand, available seats and scheduled flight times.

Some of those travelers in Utah and neighboring states also now rely on Flights From Home. The Utah company aims to uncover those golden moments when fares suddenly drop, blasting out emails to paying subscribers or posting certain deals on social media whenever coveted flights — to destinations as close as Phoenix, or as far as Peru and Vietnam — are offering cheaper seats.

The importance of these cheap flights is growing, as the price of jet fuel has roughly doubled since the start of the Iran War, while the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked. In the weeks since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, the per-barrel cost of crude oil has jumped to more than $100 from about $65 before the war started at the end of February. In March, low-priced airfares were about 24% higher than at the same time in 2025, according to OAG, a global air travel data provider.

Last year, Flights From Home sent out deals for flights to 92 countries and territories, as well as 200 U.S. cities, said spokesperson Carly Coombs. Typically the company’s flight experts don’t send a deal unless the ticket is at least 40% off the normal price, Coombs said, though some discounts are as steep as 80%.

The site makes revenue from its tiers of subscribers. Users seeking economy-class fares can pay an annual fee of $49 for “premium” subscriptions, with upgrades for access to additional flights and deals priced at $129 and $199. They also provide a selection of free offers — about a fourth of the deals flights experts find — to their “basic” tier of subscribers, and post those options on their popular Instagram accounts.

Flights From Home’s CEO is Chris Muhlestein, a 33-year-old former Utah Valley University student who loves to travel and loves a bargain. Once, in late 2013, he found a mistake fare offered by Delta and flew round trip from Salt Lake City to Hawaii for under $100.

He tried to pass that deal on to friends and family, but they weren’t all able to get the same price. Even so, he wanted to share that same thrill and, while 21 and still at UVU, created Pomelo Travel, a similar subscription service that focuses more on international travel from destinations across the U.S., not just the Mountain West.

“My intention was,” he said, “How can I get people out there? How can I get people experiencing the world?”

He acquired Flights From Home in 2018 from a Salt Lake City attorney who had started it two years earlier.

His websites have taken off. Flights From Home’s main Instagram account now has more than 431,000 followers. He declined to disclose how many paid subscribers it has, but between the more-popular Flights From Home site and Pomelo Travel, his sites have tallied about 1 million users, paying and nonpaying.

Flights From Home has also expanded from the Salt Lake City airport since Muhlenstein took over, to include Provo, Las Vegas, Boise and Idaho Falls. Still, about 75% of the site’s users, he estimated, are Utahns.

It makes sense. A Tribune analysis found that Salt Lake City’s airport is the nation’s fifth most expensive. That’s partly because it’s one of the only big airports between Denver and the West Coast.

It’s also because Delta, which hosts a hub in Salt Lake City, has so much sway over airport prices, since it makes up about 70% of flights, Muhlenstein said. (The Tribune’s analysis of flight prices found that a Delta ticket is $140 more than the median ticket price out of SLC.)

But some smaller budget airlines are squeezing into gates, and that is creating the competition that can lead to a deal, Muhlestein said.

Global travel at an early age

When Muhlestein was on the cusp of adulthood, he got the chance to travel with his sociologist uncle to Southeast Asia and the Middle East. It changed everything, he said.

“I’m 17, living in Utah County my whole life,” he remembered, “and to see people that were living completely differently than me — and all so happy — made me question some of my core beliefs.”

That summer of 2013, he and his uncle were in northern Jordan, in the Badia desert region. Amid the vast, rugged terrain just miles from the Syrian border, he found wonderful people, good food and even better hospitality.

“Different food, different ways of working and making money, different religion, different ways of thinking, different ways of being” — it gave him perspective.

He had grown up in post-911 America and seen Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism. He recalled his teenage epiphany: “If I could get everybody out there talking with people from the Arab world and having this experience, gosh, the whole world would be a much better place.”

Travel can be transformative, and it can also be expensive. But not all the time.

That’s something Emily Holt understood when she created Flights From Home in 2016. For her, it was just a “passion project,” she said.

At the time, she said, her family didn’t have a “ton of money.” The only way she could afford to travel was by finding inexpensive flights. She was good at it and wanted to share her findings with friends and family.

That led to an Instagram page. By October 2016, she had posted about 70 times, and the account had around 2,300 followers.

It kept growing. Before she sold to Muhlestein, followers ballooned to more than 100,000. At that time, about three years into her law career, Holt said she had to make a choice: Practice law, or run Flights From Home.

“For me,” she said, “it was never about the followers.” Instead, she said she got the most satisfaction from hearing from people who’d gotten to travel because she had helped them find a deal.

So, she chose to sell. Neither Holt nor Muhlestein disclosed the price.

Today, that Instagram account has quadrupled, and the company has about 25 employees, many of whom are part-time flight experts who search for deals on Google or who peruse airline promotions. The customer service team, Muhlestein said, is local to the airports they serve.

“If you write us an email or comment on our social media, it’s one of us really talking to you,” he said — not a bot.

Before she sold, Holt had introduced a paid-subscriber system. The site now has several tiers of subscription options that range from free to $199 a year, depending on whether a user wants access to deals in business or first class sections, or the ability to use points or miles instead of cash.

To get a deal, a subscriber can click a link in the email that takes them to a Google Flights window and book the flight directly from there. Sometimes, the company sends out promo codes as well, as they did recently for 35% off Hawaiian Airlines flights to Rarotonga in the Cook Islands.

Jenny Smith, one flight expert, said the company considers factors outside of price, like length of layover.

They typically won’t send alerts for flights with long layovers — like over six hours — or flights that have multiple stops – unless the deals are good enough, or the layovers are long enough in a city worth a short visit.

‘Happy to go anywhere and everywhere’

In early March, Cort Watson, a 24-year old senior at Brigham Young University-Idaho was preparing to go on his first international trip.

He had been planning to go to Alaska or Boston as a present to himself for graduating from, before he began his job.

“I was just scrolling Instagram one day, and [Flights From Home] had flights to Dublin for like $440,” he said. “It was the same cost, if not cheaper, than it was to go to Boston or to Anchorage.”

It felt like a no-brainer. He called some of his friends, and a handful of others agreed to go.

That is part of Flights From Home’s charm. Yes, Muhlestein conceded, someone could likely find a travel deal themselves if they tried hard enough, but with his service and enough flexibility, the deals come to you.

Maybe you’d never thought of visiting Puerto Rico or Iceland, but when you get an email notification that you can fly there round trip for $186 or $693, respectively — deals the company sent out in March — a mind starts to wander.

That’s how Bryana Robinson, a 30-year-old Salt Lake County-based therapist and prolific traveler who has visited more than 40 countries, went on about a dozen flights using the company’s deals, including a round trip flight to Sydney, Australia, four years ago for around $900. She had been looking at that destination for years, she said, but tickets were as high as $2,000.

So she pounced. Now she has snorkeled above the Great Barrier Reef, watched ballet at Sydney’s iconic Opera House and leveraged this trip to pop over to New Zealand to tour Lord of the Rings filming locations.

Robinson said that flexibility and openness — being “happy to go anywhere and everywhere” — are key.

“That’s why it works for me,” she said. “It probably doesn’t work as well for people who have very specific places they want to go at very specific dates.”

Muhlestein has ambitions to expand the company nationwide, but he doesn’t want to move too quickly. That expansion would likely start by building out Flights From Home’s footprint across the West.

In the meantime, he said, the company is focusing on attaining more points and miles deals.

But Muhlestein said the numbers side of the business is less important to him than getting people to leave.

“The real goal,” he said, “is that you come home a better person.”