By: Kristine Marshall, Marketing Development
It’s been less than a week since we expanded to more than 55 U.S. departure airports, and thousands of you have written in with your comments and suggestions. We wanted to share some of your thoughts:
- I just wanted to let you know what a cool site you guys have! I saw it on the news on Channel 8 in Dallas (afternoon news), emailed the link to a friend. 30 minutes later her and her husband are coming to visit us (from Seattle). I think she saved over $300!!
- It sure beats throwing a dart at the open yellow pages or garnering lots of SPAM while searching on line.
- I think this is a great idea. I’ve tried to guess fare increases and decreases and been wrong about 70% of the time.
- Other than the relatively short list of airports, I LOVE this service and will absolutely be a regular user.
- I love it when a group of people put technology to work to make my life easier!
- I can’t remember the last time I found a new website that seems so promising. I’d be really excited if Farecast worked with a larger range of arrival / destination location pairs, especially international locations. Once it does this, it’ll be an exceptionally useful tool to me and, I’m sure, to many other travelers.
It’s great to know that some of you are helped out by our predictions already, and if you’d like to help get the word out about our services, you can vote for Farecast.com in Business Week’s “Best of the Web 2006” poll. Just use the write-in option and vote by September 8, 2006.
On another note, we understand that some of you would like to see more cities – both domestic and international. Naturally, we are considering adding more U.S. departure cities and destinations and possibly adding some international destinations from U.S. departure cities. However, we currently have no specific timeline for this, but suggestions for new cities are always welcome!
In the meantime, check out some airfare predictions with a Quick Search**, set up an RSS feed to track fares and predictions for your trip, and try out Flexible Search to look for fares over a 30-day period. In the near future, we will add some exciting new features, and we invite you to come back and check it out.
**Tip: To get a Fare Prediction and a Fare History, search for trips departing within 90 days from today and are 2-8 nights long.
This site sucks. My wife got cheaper rates on her own… at least $100 cheaper
I meant to email this, but it is a relevant product question so I figure I could leave it in the comments.
I really like the idea of the site. The only problem is that I’m pretty last minute with things and I am usually booking flights at the same time that I have to book the flight.
I did notice an error in your data and I’m not sure how or why. About a week ago I was checking flight from Laguardia to Akron/Canton for September 7-10. The lowest price on Airtran was about $170 round trip. I went back the next day to book the flight and the price had changed to $49 each way - Sweet!
I booked the flight at $118 including taxes etc.
On your site you say that the lowest price in the last 40 days was about $147. So why do you think I got the ubelievable price of $47? And why do you think you guys didn’t see $118 as the lowest price? Any ideas.
Cool site, thanks I will use it.
Mike
Mike and Don, thanks for your comments. There is an answer to your question on our beta limitations page, located at http://www.farecast.com/about/betaLimit.jsp
The answer is that you may find we are missing an itinerary or a price you found on an airline site or even a competitor site. This may occur during beta because we are still fine-tuning our flight selection logic and securing access to some of the airline’s Internet fares. These issues should be resolved soon.
Check out the Beta Limitations page for other tid bits of info, and thanks again for sharing your experiences with us.
Great concept and the execution is pretty good. I am puzzled as to why the same cities are not on both the origin and destination drop-downs.
I have a daughter flying home for Thanksgiving and it helped her to make the decision on when to buy her ticket.
[...] In a previous post, I mentioned BusinessWeek.com’s “Best of the Web 2006” poll, which was conducted in early September. Apparently the word got out and thanks to the votes of supporters like you, Farecast.com placed fourth in the Trip Planning category. This is exciting news for us, and we thank you for all your votes! [...]
Hi there
First, I love farecast and have evangelized it to all my friends. Here’s what would be exceptionally awesome and help promote your site to make it the #1 airfare site on the market:
make a widget where someone can enter flight info and get a small display box showing your branded ‘prediction’ graphic
so for example I would put in something like http://farecast.com/widget/from/ord/to/den/2006-01-01/to/2007-01-05
(pretty urls are important for adoption and make it easy for others to implement)
And I would get a little prediction graphic along with a link to farecast to buy stuff.
Next step is make it an affiliate program, and pay people comissions from sales via the widget.
You already have the trip tracking RSS feed which is a good first step, but turning it into a real embeddable widget makes it so much more accessible.
I would love to be the first customer for this for this with my website (Planypus) -the place where friends make plans. People are using it to plan out their vacations and it’d be nice to embed a farecast widget instead of continuously having to tell people “Farecast says 77% confidence so buy your tickets now”!
Good luck!
I live in Alaska and you have only 6 destination choices for me to choose from! 2 of them are in Alaska! Believe me, the last thing I want to do is travel within this state! Anyway, I can’t find any way to choose other destinations like Chicago, Phoenix, Cinci etc.
What am I missing?
I love the concept. I need more choices!
Why no flight info on Kansas City (MCI)?