Farecast by MSN
I first heard this new site Farecast.com when they won a Webby Award (Personally I think some corporate politics where involved in that). Here’s what you need to know about Farecast. It’s an airline booking engine developed by Microsoft (that’s the first thing you notice…it also means it’s not eye candy either).
The good: Farecast is probably the first massive airline booking site where the links take you directly to the Airline’s own site (Delta, AA, Southwest etc.). Which is great because anytime you purchase through expedia, orbits, cheaptickets, etc. they will charge you a small additional fee.
Farecast also has a predictive pricing application (currently for about 30 major cities) that allows you to see if the prices are going up or down. For the few test runs I did, they all had the same “Tip: Buy” Prediction.
also like how they handled the “6 tickets left at this price.”
The bad: When I was typing in the cities, it jumped to the search results without first letting me put in my travel dates. Like it was so excited to show off the new search features it skipped important information. I did manage to get it to work eventually.
The confusing: There are plenty of advertisements from Travelocity, Cheapflights, Expedia and more booking engines on Farecast. So I don’t understand? Is Farecast trying to put their sponsors out of business? Because that’s what this booking engine will do. Somebody explain that to me.