Congrats to the Farecast gang for moving out of private to public beta today. Though, with mentions on TechCrunch and BoingBoing, among others, it's not like my little heads-up here matters. That's some serious b-sphere coverage. Nicely done Mike and team.

Now their challenge is to prove that the whiz-bang, P.R.-friendly airfare predictor feature is more than the flavour-of-the-month, and to continue to build on the solid start of their metasearch tool. Oh, and to move into hotels because that's where the cash is. No small task.

Tags: farecast

Farecast, a Seattle-based travel start-up, is in private beta. I was invited to try it out, and I did. On the whole, it's pretty good - but I am fearful that beyond the relatively small amount of whiz-bang buzz their "hook" adds, they are really just another meta-search site. Albeit a clean and well-designed one.

Their "hook" is that they claim to be able to predict what will happen with fares, thereby providing customer value by guiding when someone should buy to maximize their fare savings. Pretty cool on the face of it, and the visual presentation is also pretty neat. But does it really add a lot of value? I think it's a snappy feature and no doubt the algorithm is impressive, but will it pull them in and keep them? I'm unconvinced.

Beyond that, the site is clean, nice and ajax-y and the search display is easy to interpret. But I can't say that it is orders of magnitude better than any other meta-sites, or say Orbitz's grid for instance.

Another unfortunate negative (mentioned by Michael Arrington in his post) is that, despite pulling schedule info from Southwest and JetBlue, they don't pull pricing info into the initial fare display. This is a pity, as it pushes those options to the bottom of the display and potentially skews the prices listed. Said another way, if one of those carriers offered the lowest price, you'd never know it and the prices shown as lowest might be wrong simply because they aren't shown. But Southwest has a longstanding history of not allowing their fares to show in an aggregated display (possibly because head-to-head they frequently don't compare as well as people might expect) so Farecast getting this access would be quite a coup - and one they haven't managed as yet.

Net/net: The predictor is a nice little whiz-bang feature that has some PR value, but essentially Farecast is just another meta-search entry in what is becoming a crowded market.

Update: TechDirt says that if it casts light on airline pricing, it will have value. Maybe at the highest or industry level, but adding stress to travellers lives by telling them to wait before they buy won't necessarily make their lives better. And how are the carriers going to feel about a site that drives them to lower yields?

Update 2: The folks at Farecast gave me 25 invites to share with others who might like to kick the tires, too. If you'd like one, let me know here or at stuart [at] stuartmacdonald [dot] ca.

Thanks Mike - another Expedia alum - for the invite.

Tags: farecast, travel, metasearch