Farecast - Scaling new heights

United States
January 7, 2007 10:30am CST
Being a frequent traveller, I have a great need for good deals for air tickets and that led me to commercial websites like www.orbitz.com, www.expedia.com and www.travelocity.com. However, there was always this thought that whether this is the best deal or not. Farecast - the twist from the word 'forecast', is the most sophisticated airfares website that I have explored ever. The website is already on the 'look-out' list for orbitz and travelocity. Farecast has a very sensible algorithm. It gives you multiple options for chosing fare. However, what stands out is the 'buy-or-wait' feature. What 'buy-or-wait' means is that for any dates of travel that you choose, the website will give you the best fares available across airlines and then would tell you whether it is a good time to purchase the tickets at that best fare or not. There are mutliple slabs for this decision making - the lowest being 'BUY' i.e. the fare will increase in the next 7 days so it is the best time to buy the tickets and the highest being 'WAIT' i.e. the fare will decrease in the enxt 7 days. It has multiple intermediate levels of confidence that help to determine what are the chances of fares going up or down. This is backed up something called 'Confidence'. The website gives a confidence level in its prediction that the fare will go down/up. It would give numbers like 100% confident, 82%, 60% so and so forth. Another interesting feature is the rate chart for the last 62 days. This gives you a fair idea of what the lowest rate was in the last 62 days and makes (at least for me) decision making even more interesting. In addition, the webiste does feature if any additional miles would be attained if the tickets are bought from a particular airlines on a given date. One feature that can be found in other websites is about the date grids where the predictore will tell you what are the best travle dates for any destinations. This feature is available in many other sites so did not appeal to me much. On the whole, www.farecast.com has re-defined the rules for online air ticketing. What do you think about this great website?
No responses