I stumbled across Farecast while Blog surfing this morning. The site, still in early beta, is attempting to predict whether airfare between any two cities is likely to rise or fall over short period of time. It is still in early beta and only serves flights in and out of Seattle and Boston.
This is a good idea. Many of us have lost any sense of loyalty to single airlines through the variations on mileage plus programs and viewing our travel as a marketplace where price is the driving factor, is in fact what people are doing.
Farecast has some interesting features including a chart showing you the trendline of whether fares between two points are rising or falling, and who the market share leaders are along these routes. But it has no predictive functionality as far as I could determine. It does not yet take into account factors like rising or falling fuel costs, rising or falling competition along air routes. It also does not let us have one look--as Orvitz does--at multiple airports, such as we have in the Bay Area, or Los Angeles, New York City or Washington DC.
It also dawns on me that most traveler have very little flexibility in the dates they are traveling, particularly for business. Even leisure is becoming more of a challenge. A family trip to Hawaii that I booked in March could not be assembled within 30 days of the time we original wanted to go. I for one am too nervous about getting a seat at all to wait for prices to possibly go down a few dollars if I wait a few days to book.
All in all, the more information we, as travelers have, the better we can make our decisions and Farecast goes a nice little step forward in giving us intelligence on a most dynamic market that so many of us need to use.
