A site that could save you both money and time. Farecast brings you options when it comes to booking your flight. Especially if you have business travel on your list. Fares fluctuate constantly, and, as was found by Oren Etzioni during a flight he took to his brother's wedding, pricing doesn't depend on how soon you schedule the flight.
Back in 2003, Etzioni and colleagues published a paper showing that they
could predict the fluctuation in airline-ticket prices and after sifting through the history of more than 12,000 airfares for
nonstop flights from two major locations. Through this, they found that their research had a 62% accuracy with regards to the rise and fall of future ticket prices.
Reportedly the Farecast site is quite different than similar competitors like Kyak or FareCompare. These sites use different comparisons and it's quoted: "Farecast differs from these companies by using sophisticated algorithms
to mine enormous data sets of more than 175 billion airfares from
around the country. This data is collected by Boston-based ITA Software, a company that works with airlines and travel sites such as Hotwire and Orbitz to help with pricing and reservations."
Sounds useful to me!
Farecast IMO is more of a gimmick really. And they themselves say that they have, only 62% accuracy. That’s personally not enough to give confidence when looking for airfare. Plus Farecast is VERY limited on the airports and locations you can search for. It’s a great idea, but I think I’m going to stay with the metasearch sites like Sidestep. Besides, they say they use sites like Orbitz which doesn’t get you nearly as good prices as metasearch sites. Until they can safely say their accuracy is at least 85-90%, I’ll pass.