Last week I started thinking about booking my plane tickets for Reunions. My usual thought behind airline purchase decisions is, “Here’s the lowest available price. For that amount, do you really want to go?” The tacit assumption is that prices will only go up, and a last-minute getaway fare sale to your exact destination is too much to hope for.
For the last couple personal trips I’ve taken, I’ve been consulting a new website called FareCast. It leverages the power of historical price data to predict whether fares for a particular date and destination are falling, or on the rise. Every time I’d used it before, the route I was considering showed stable fares, nothing to alter a purchase decision. But on Sunday, I noticed that fares had taken a sudden jump, and felt a pang of dismay that I might have missed my chance to fly for under $250. Then, I noticed a ray of hope springing from the page:
Very well, then. I resolved to wait. Then I discovered that I needn’t make a note to check back specifically — FareCast supports RSS! Instead of entering all of my flight preferences again, I could throw a single link into my blogreader to check daily. Today, I saw exactly what I’d been looking for:
As you can see, the site has good information design… the arrow and chart concisely convey everything you need to know about the route pricing in a ten-second glance. See the big bump toward the right end of the history graph? That’s when I originally looked for tickets. That’s when you don’t want to buy tickets. Without FareCast, that’s when I probably would have. In the end, Farecast probably saved me about $20, given that I’m picky about which airlines I fly for mileage purposes.
It’s not enough savings to convince me to buy their $10 “fare insurance,” because while I might at least come out even, I doubt I’d ever be up more than a trivial amount. However, if I’m ever forced to buy a really expensive ticket to a destination that seems likely to produce last-minute weekend specials, I’ll consider it, because the methodology certainly works!
The picket fences are going up!