Tag Archives: Farecast

What happened to Kayak and Farecast ??

I wrote about how I was a huge fan of Farecast last march. I still am, now I use Kayak just as much, but overall I just love the idea of having a meta-search engine that allows me to easily find the cheapest airfare possible for wherever it is I want to go.

BUT…

I spent two very frustrating hours last night using both Farecast and Kayak. And then Expedia and Orbitz and a variety of airline websites and now I’m utterly confused. Either someone (i.e. an airline) has some very dirty data, or I’ve been swindled into trusting these meta-search engines to provide a service which they’re actually not capable of providing.

I was trying to book a flight from London Heathrow to Seattle in December. I’ve been watching the fares pretty regularly (since June) on Kayak and all through the summer the lowest fare was about $550 return with KLM/NWA. Happy days. That’s a rock-bottom fare on that route. So, credit card in hand, last night I went to book the actual ticket. And then my world came tumbling down. I ended up paying $820 for the flight. Still not as bad as the $1200 my friend paid for her flight on the same route this past June, but not the lowest-fare-ever I’ve had my eye on.

What happened ?
I searched on Kayak, found my fare, and clicked on the select button – which, since the fare was offered by Orbitz, brought me to the Orbitz website. Three, no, four attempts to book this fare. Each accompanied with pithy, yet meaningless error message. So I tried the same search on Farecast, Expedia and then the KLM and Northwest Airlines websites. The user experience was a little more pleasant than Orbitz, but nary a sign of my $550 fare.

I booked my flight at the best price I could find and sulked a little. But I couldn’t let it go. For good measure I just searched both Kayak and Farecast for the same flights just now and the same $550 fare with KLM comes up top of the results on both websites. Obviously that fare existed at some point in time – otherwise it couldn’t exist in the search listings. But equally obviously it’s been sold out. Surely the usefulness of these meta-search engines is seriously compromised if ‘stale’ data, such as fares which are no longer available, is not removed from the pool of available of fares promptly ?

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The Farecast Take on Airfare Seasonality

If you are the person responsible for travel planning in your household, you may have already discovered “smart” travel search websites like Farecast.com or Kayak.com. These sites are not online booking engines. Instead, they help users find the best available option for flights, car rentals and hotels by searching across many other websites (the technical term is meta-search engine). Although you may think the amount of data returned from such a search would be just too much to display comprehensibly, both sites are downright fun to use. I particularly like the prediction indicators on Farecast.

As a dedicated travel junkie, I thought I should subscribe to a newsletter from one of these websites at least for a little while to see if this new technology could really help me. I chose Farecast for no other reason than it’s a Seattle-based company & I’m a Seattlite. Well, when I received my very first email from them, I was blown away. The topic of the email was “Search for Summer Trips Today”. The email included a chart of average airfares between the U.S. and Europe from Feb 2007 to Feb 2008.

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The chart is also posted on the Farecast blog.

From experience I “knew” that flying to Europe was more expensive at peak times (July, August & Christmas) than at off-peak times; and that I could usually get pretty good prices in April/May and sept/Oct. If Farecast’s data is correct, the seasonal differences in airfares are nothing short of stunning. As John Rauser, the author of the Farecast blog posting referenced above says: “for travel to Europe in the Summer, you’re looking at paying a 150% premium, or two-and-a-half times more than in Winter”.

Since Farecast caught my attention with this newsletter, I’ve become a travel meta-search website junkie. When searching for flights, I highly recommend you start your search at one of these websites. You’ll get flight choices from booking engines and airline websites you may not have thought to check.

But, I do have a comment for the fine folks at Farecast who sent out a summer trip planning newsletter in March. I booked the flights for my family’s trip this coming June in January. I paid $200 less per person than the best flight I could find using Farecast today (April 1st). For a family of four, that’s an $800 saving. Perhaps next year you could send out your trip planning email a little earlier ?

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