Whenever I travel, I tend to agonize over airline ticket prices and wonder if I should buy now or wait, especially when buying tickets for my entire family. Farecast, a recent entry into the online travel service space, attempts to help with this problem by not only showing current ticket prices, but predicting future prices based on historical trends and recommending when to buy.
On first glance, Farecast looks similar to many travel sites. There is a form to enter your travel information — to, from, dates, number of travelers, etc. After you fill out the form and click search, you see a list of available fares. The difference is you will also see a fare history and prediction, similar to this chart (for a search of Indianapolis to Orlando, Dec 28-Jan 5):
In this case, Farecast recommends that I wait to purchase, as they predict the price will drop by at least $50 within the next 7 days. The “69% confidence” means that similar predictions they made in the past were correct 69% of the time.
You can search and get pricing on any available flights, but there are some exceptions if you want to see Farecast’s future pricing predictions. To see predictions, your trip must be 2-8 nights in length, and depart within 90 days. Also, currently only 75 airports are included (Indianapolis is one).
The Farecast web site has a beta feature to search for hotel rooms, but it is little more limited at this time than the flight search. In regard to this, the web site says “Rate Keys are limited—30 destinations, missing many major hotels. We plan to improve our coverage to eventually include all major cities and hotels in the U.S. and around the globe.”
Farecast has lots of other neat tools, including a graph that shows cheapest flights in the next 30 days, and cheapest flights between multiple destinations. It’s definitely worth a look when you make your next airline reservations.
