The “Break it Down” Blog

Todd Swarthout sent in a link to a pretty cool new site from Microsoft: Farecast.

The idea behind Farecast is very similar to Kayak or Mobissimo where you specify your departure and arrival city and then use all these nice AJAX-ey controls to fine-tune your search results on the fly.

The difference with Farecast is that it also uses historical information for the cost of the flight you are looking up to predict where the fare will go in the near future (up or down), gives you a level of confidence it has in it’s decision, and then issues a suggestion to you like Wait (don’t take the trip on those dates) or supports you decision to buy those tickets.

As you can see from the screenshots above, I spec’ed out a flight from Phoenix to Paris and the Farecast suggestion was for me to wait, because apparently the cost of that flight has jumped around a bit in the near past almost close to $500; so waiting might be a good idea for me.

If you have any favorite travel sites you use, let us know!