Farecast

I’ve read a couple of things about this new site Farecast, and figured I’d go take a look for myself. The site is still in beta, or out of beta though hardly ready for primetime, but what it offers is a unique and much-needed (or at least very useful) take on the whole Web 2.0 travel site thing. What FareCast does is shows you the price history of a particular flight and then offers you what the price forecast is.

That is, through a series of complex algorithms…and some weird juju I don’t profess to understand, black magic if you will, the site will tell you if the price is trending up or down. They also offer a confidence meter showing the likelihood they are right and how the price differs according to time of day.

In other words, it takes what a company like kayak offers and then throws a lot more useful information at you. Really pretty cool. The sad thing is that , as I mentioned, the site hardly works yet, with the ability to view only outgoing flights from Boston and Seattle. But so far, this could be a really cool new way to shop for flights.