Farecast.com - Buy now or buy later? Predictions of airfares rising or falling.

Farecast.com is attempting to make online flight purchases simpler by putting an end to the guessing game of whether you should buy now or wait to see if the price changes. In its initial beta stages, the services are offered only for a limited selection of U.S. cities, but you can already see where the site could go once it expands its offering. Farecast allows users to vote for their city to be added to the list so that they can continue expanding their selection according to user need.

“We predict where fares are going and show where they"ve beenâ€"now for more than 75 home airports (indicated in green within the search form). Our free airfare predictions are 70-75% accurate. Each prediction includes the following elements: An indication of whether the lowest fare is rising, dropping, or staying the same, a percentage based on our track record for similar predictions for the market searched, an amount reflecting the average fare change recorded when similar predictions were correct for the market, and our recommendation based on the prediction information.”

Finally, a way to know whether or not you should buy your tickets right away, without checking and re-checking a site fifty times in one week to see if the price has changed. The site provides plenty of airline price information and a quick and flexible search. It is user-friendly and once it provides more cities to choose from, it is sure to be a popular option for online airfare shopping. In many ways it surpasses the competition.

Farecast´s main advantage is its prediction power, and users need to know that they can trust what the site recommends. Is 70-75 percent accuracy going to be enough to sway people to use Farecast with consistency? In order to be a favorite price-comparison site, Farecast needs to work hard to stay accurate in its predictions. The airfare economy is very volatile and is extremely difficult to predict, so Farecast has definitely got its work cut out for it if they want to become and remain popular with all the well-established competition out there.