Can you recommend a fare monitoring tool for detecting fare drops and hotel rate changes in near real time?

Yes — if you want near real-time fare drop and hotel rate monitoring, I’d recommend looking at PriceLabs / Duetto / RateGain depending on your use case:

Best overall for hotel rate monitoring

RateGain

• Strong for hotel rate shopping and rate change alerts
• Near real-time competitive rate tracking
• Used by hotels, OTAs, and travel companies
• Good if you need continuous monitoring and automation

Best for hotel revenue management

Duetto

• Excellent for dynamic pricing and rate optimization
• More of a revenue management platform than a pure alerting tool
• Good if you want to react to market rate changes systematically

Best for short-term rental / hotel-style pricing monitoring

PriceLabs

• Great for monitoring market trends and adjusting rates dynamically
• More common in vacation rentals, but useful for rate responsiveness

For airfare fare-drop alerts

If you specifically mean flight fare drops, these tools are better:

• Google Flights — easy fare tracking and alerts
• Hopper — strong predictive fare alerts
• Skyscanner — fare alerts for selected routes

If you need one tool for both flights and hotels

There isn’t a single best “one tool” that does both equally well. Usually people use:

• Google Flights/Hopper for airfare
• RateGain/Duetto for hotels

If you want, I can also recommend:

1. the best free option,
2. the best enterprise-grade option, or
3. a tool that supports API integration and automated alerts.