Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Use FareCast To Find Best Travel Deals

For those of you like me who travel a lot for business, there's a fairly new web site powered by Microsoft called FareCast.com.

The site allows you to search for airplane tickets from all the major airlines, and find hotel rooms at all the major hotels. No big deal right? You can do this on Orbitz, Expedia, Travelocity, and others.

FareCast, however, has a feature called "Low Fare Prediction" that will predict whether or not the ticket prices shown will rise or drop. For instance, you may get a message saying: "Wait: There's an 80% chance that the price for this ticket will drop" or "Buy Now: This ticket price will rise soon."

The web site also indicates whether or not today's rate for a specific hotel is a deal. It compares an individual hotel's current rate found to its observed historical rates. For instance, you may get a message saying "No deal" or "Deal".

Apparently, Farecast is the 2008 Webby Award winner in the travel category and is recognized as one of Web 2.0's "Best Travel Sites" - amongst other notable accolades.

I just started using it, and it's a really neat tool. Give it a try.

2 comments:

  1. I don't know where i got hip to this. But last year I used it to get to SanFran for cheap (from philly, that's no mean feat). It's a great way to see not only what fares are now, but where they might go in the future.

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  2. I used Farecast to travel to Boston in Oct. 07. I watched for a few weeks and it predicted the price to drop, which it did not, it increased. It kept saying not to buy yet, so I followed their advice. Ultimately, it cost me more to fly from Detroit to Boston than it cost my sister to fly from LA to Boston, thanks to Farecast!

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