Today I stumbled on to Farecast.com, a site that predicts the price of airfare for the next 90 days. I have to say that I'm really blown away by the site. It's UI is great, it's content is great and it seems to be extremely useful... though actually using it to score a fare at the lowest price would make me more of a believer.
They break things down and show you a chart of not only when to book your flight, but at what times your flight should depart in order to get the lowest fares also. Take a look at the following search result from DFW to Denver International (click to enlarge picture).
It's a handy tool. In addition to helping you time your flights right by giving you predictions, they also show you historical price patterns for the flights you're looking for in the last 90 days.
Taking a look at their explanation of their own technology, I found the following information:
We use data-mining algorithms to search for patterns, in the accumulated airfare data, which are associated with significant price changes. These patterns are represented and stored in models, and the models are then rigorously trained. Once created and trained, we use these models to predict the future. Then, new, current airfares can be scored by the model to answer the question, “is the price going up or down in the future?
Genius.
It might just be that I'm happy to have stumbled across this site because Katie and I are in the last stages of planning a vacation where we'll be flying... or it could just be the computer scientist geek in me, but I'm captivated by the idea and the implementation. Kudos to the site's creators on a job well done... did I just say kudos...?
Posted by Jordan at October 11, 2006 8:15 PM | TrackBack