Some of you have written in to share issues like, “there are times when I am willing to make a trip, but I’m not really wedded to any specific date.” Given the vast amount of data we collect and your flexibility in such cases, we provide three tools to help you decide when to travel ? the Map, the Graph and the Grid in our Flexible Search area.
From the “Flexible Search” tab located at the top of the search form on farecast.live.com, you can find these features. The Map allows you to see yesterday’s lowest fare for destinations from the departure city you selected.
The Graph takes this same information to another level by letting you view yesterday’s lowest fare for a given departure date.
The Grid takes all this to a whole new level by allowing you to view yesterday’s lowest fare by departure date and trip duration.
Can you imagine how much time this saves? Find out if it’s better to go to Orlando or to New York, if you should travel at the beginning of the month or a bit later or if you should extend or shorten your trip. Instead of entering in multiple searches to check different dates, destinations or trip durations, you can get a snapshot in just one search.
For a more detailed tour of these features, check out the How It Works page. (http://farecast.live.com/about/howFlexSearch.jsp)
[...] Some great news in my inbox this morning: “Farecast is happy to announce that airfare predictions for flights out of Atlanta (ATL) are now available at Farecast.com.” Farecast predicts ticket prices and indicates fare history for the routes you’re interested in. They claim 75% accuracy in their predictions, and they also have some cool visual tools that will make the ticket shopping less complicated. Hopefully this will add some little transparency to a fairly shrouded market. [...]
Not certain how to add cities for the graph feature of flexible travel…insight?
These are some really nice tools. I especially like the grid tool–I think I would/will find it useful for vacation planning. If you’re taking suggestions, some filtering tools (like the ones available in the standard list views) would be great as well. For example, being able to look at the grid and filtering out all non-non-stop flights would be great: when I’m planning a vacation I may want to look for the cheapest *non-stop* arrival/departure combinations, for example.
Great site, I’ve been having fun following its progress!