Seattle startup Farecast is taking their airfare prediction technology nation wide today, flights departing from 55 US cities are now available for price history, predictions and buy/wait recommendations. The site also offers RSS feeds for automatically tracking fares and predictions over time. We’ve written about Farecast prior to launch and when the beta site first opened.
Farecast received $8.5 million in funding from Greylock Partners, Madrona Venture Group and WRF Capital. Development and testing of the site has taken 3 years. The site was named by Time Magazine as one of the 50 coolest sites on the web this year. It’s a real crowd pleaser and I’m sure many people will be interested in trying their services out now that they’ve extended their reach.
The RSS feeds mean you can test it out yourself very easily; I’ve subscribed to a search for fares from Portland, Oregon to Austin, Texas leaving and returning middle of next month. I’ll keep an eye on the feed and see if it does anything more interesting than go up two weeks before my supposed departure date. I expect in many cases it will - but it should be easy to verify with time.
Has Farecast actually worked for anyone? It failed pretty miserably for me. The only thing useful, is the cool graph it creates with the rates for the past few weeks. Not really worth $8.5 million though.
Worked pretty well for me. Not sure I like the amount of ads they are running.
Couple of tickets that I checked, seems it did well.
However I am not really travelling now, and when I travel, I do lot of research. I goto websites travelociyt,orbitz,expedia etc. along with the actual airline website, also travel deal sites, monitor prices for few days and then finally purchase ticket. If this site really beats all my research, that would be amazing, and it will be huge hit.
They have 22 phd’s, that must be something.
Farecast is based on the premise of using “data-mining algorithms to search for patterns, in the accumulated airfare data, which are associated with significant price changes.” In other words, they claim to be “predicting” the future to advise when to buy the cheapest airfare.
Um, okay. So, what happens if they’re fabulously successful in capturing marketshare and most travelers are using their service? What’s left to predict?
I wonder if this is generating any sort of unfair advantage for the airlines with whom they have contracts. Search engines do it. They tend to rank paying customers higher on the results. It brings into light the question of true data accuracy. How do consumers know they’re getting the best deal (and not being screwed by some secret partnership)?
I guess those in the know will just have to choose not to use the tool.
And haven’t I seen this kind of tool somewhere before, on some other airfare search site?
This site is really cool… I would love having such a thing in Europe.
What’w more… I wonder if youcan take their prediction engine and tweak it to work on other stuff… for example - online auctions. If they could predict if I should buy someone on ebay or other vendor site in specific price, this could be an amazing tool.
cFares is also very cool. It differs from Travelocity, Expedia & Orbitz that rely completely on whatever inventory is kicked over to global distribution ticketing systems but have no access to airlines’ internal inventories. That’s where Kayak and SideStep outdo the older travel sites. Now cFares becomes the first and only online travel that provides travelers with access to additional $20 billion of consolidator bookable inventory. cFares can find the cheapest fares internationally. cFares also gives airlines a unique opportunity to under-bid another airline at the point of sale, thereby providing a below-market price to the consumer. What would be very cool is to combine the two services, FareCast to find out if prices are increasing or decreasing for a particular timeframe, and then use cFares to scout out the cheapest airfares.
When this first beta tested, I suggested to them to change their suggestion arrow colors. I know it is small, but tons of people have commented about that before. Buy now is red, and wait is green. Isn’t that kind of counter-intuitive? I’m pretty sure, most people associate go with green, and wait/stop with red. $8.5m and they can’t get colors correct!
I just checked a couple of destinations that I am fairly familiar with now that farecast has launched with additional cities and a I noticed a couple of serious flaws.
1. They are missing some combinations that include the usually cheapest flights (specifically Oakland to Chicago Midway)
2. This implies that they are not (or may not be, I have to test further) capturing data from Southwest Airlines
3. They do not have a concept built-in for “the city” vs. “the airport” there are many parts of the country where a good fare search should include multiple airports. The Bay Area (Oakland, San Francisco, perhaps San Jose and even Sacramento); Chicago (O’Hare and Midway at least, even Milwaukee sometimes); New York City (Newark, Laguardia, JFK), LA (five options for many passengers) etc.
My current practice for finding the lowest fare is to start with http://www.kayak.com - their search engine is fast, accurate, and very comprehensive, though they have a few minor flaws (can’t easily get them to search for a flight after 10pm or do complex multi-city fares). They too don’t seem to include Southwest, so I then always compare with what Southwest is offering.
I also like that kayak links to the site (or sites) that offer the lowest fares, and they show when/if those sites are charging any fees.
And unlike the truly dreadful UI of a site such as United Airlines (which insists on only showing you a handful of time combinations if you search for the lowest fare with next to no flexibility for you to adjust it even if other search sites show the times you want at the price you want) Kayak’s site shows you a lot of fare options with a flexible ajax ui to drill down to the factors that matter for you (time of departure/arrival for example - albeit with the caveat of not often offering after 10pm arrival times - there have been many times I would gladly arrive home late to save serious money on the flight).
Shannon
When i checked - it shows Fare Prediction unavailable !
– Thyaga
I liked what I saw, personally. I did a quick search, and it gave me something tangible. I completely agree with the comment above about the arrow colors, it is counter-intuitive.
Sure, I was surprised to read that this website cost 8.5 million dollars…but hey.
I had a good time on the site. Found a flight that I had booked months ago and it was cheaper on this site!
Anyways you guys have to remember just because they have 8.5 million under the belt doesnt mean they have gone though all of it! Programming and development takes time and testing. My 2 cents….
In Europe you can use SkyScanner (www.skyscanner.net) that has been doing pretty much same for the last 3 years.