farecast : less private, still beta
Still planning your summer getaway? After months of an invite-only test phase, FareCast, a work-in-progress web service that predicts the best date to buy a plane ticket, has opened its search space to the public today. Because the site is still in beta, searches for roundtrip travel must originate in either Boston or Seattle; making it useful for locals trying to get out of town to most major U.S. destinations.
The site works by charting the lowest prices for a given itinerary over the last seventy-five days and using that data to advise users on the optimal date to buy. The algorithm provides an estimate of confidence and search results highlight lowest prices as well as additional advantages to be earned for online purchases.
If you’ve been salivating over the chance to check it out, love charts and graphs, or just need to escape our latest heat wave, this is a good day to take a look.
I can’t actually see the fare forecast graphs, but even without that working it’s still a really useful interface for comparison shopping, because of the way it lets me keep narrowing options down without having to do slow repeat searches like the big online travel agents.
that’s odd. their limitations page mentions some softward requirements, maybe upgrading to the latest version of a recommended web browser would allow you to see the pretty graphs? or maybe they’re just swamped with internet attention?
I investigated a little more, and found out that their Flash content wasn’t playing well with one of the Firefox extensions I have installed. It is even better with the forecasts, but I do actually reckon the improvement it offers over existing flight comparison interfaces is still the best thing about it.