Farecast.com

Photo Illustration: Jamie Divecchio Ramsay

MY FARE LADY Recently, I did some serious Web surfing over a two-week period in hopes of scoring cheap airfare for an April trip to Boston. At first, the flights were in the low-$300 range. In this economy, I thought incredulously, it’s gotta come down. But days later, the price had escalated to the high $300s, then the low $400s. After brooding about my bad luck for a couple of days, I checked the price again: It had dropped to $250. Now should I wait longer for an even better deal? Or buy, stat? That’s when I stumbled across farecast.com, my new favorite travel site. I plugged in my trip info and learned the Boston airfare I’d found was rock bottom and had a very high probability of rising again in the next couple of days. Okay! Tix purchased! Whew! Here’s how the site computes that data: Each day, Farecast processes millions of round-trip, priced flight itineraries from different sources (aggregate search engines, airline sites, etc.) and uses patented algorithms and data regressions to project future rates. Each trip you search is equivalent to performing thousands of searches on a typical travel-search site. It’s not a perfect science, but it’s about as good as it gets. Out of morbid curiosity, I’ve checked back in on the Boston tix: They’re currently going for $391 round-trip. Booyah!

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