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Homing In on Lower Airfares

[url]http://biz.yahoo.com/weekend/faretime_1.html[/url]


Web Sites Offer New Features To Help Users Time Purchases To Get a Better Travel Deal

When the price of an airline ticket can change several times a day, it's hard to feel secure about locking in the lowest fare. But several Web sites are adding features intended to help you feel confident about the price you're paying.

FareCompare.com offers historical prices for trips in 77,000 markets in the U.S. and Canada -- data that haven't been available before to consumers. Farecast.com goes a step further, using sophisticated data-mining techniques to predict whether prices for a particular trip are likely to go up or down over the next week. Kayak.com now has a feature called Buzz that shows the best prices found by other Kayak users on the most searched destinations over the past 48 hours.

Go to the Wall Street Journal Online to see tips for finding the best travels deals.
Tips for scouting out the best travels deals

Airlines monkey around with ticket prices as much as three times a day for domestic itineraries and prices can change on international trips as often as five times a day. What's more, fares on a particular flight can change quickly -- up or down -- as seats sell or remain empty. A lack of sales can prompt airline computers to offer more seats at a lower price.

"You need to know what a decent price is," says Rick Seaney, chief executive and president of FareCompare. "Consumers should be more educated about purchases."

Booking air travel is increasingly a self-service business, with airline Web sites taking a bigger share of bookings and growing even faster than online agencies such as Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz. They all provide lots of prices, but little historical context. In a way, sites like FareCompare, Farecast and Kayak perform the functions of a good travel agent, who would often track pricing changes and know how to spot deals. Since the Internet has turned many consumers into their own travel agents, the new online tools can help them make better buying decisions.

FareCompare shows the lowest prices offered by month for the next 11 months in any U.S. market, and offers a "Fare Trend" graph showing whether the lowest prices have been increasing, decreasing or holding steady. You can quickly see whether prices in that market bounce around or stay consistent. And with the current prices, FareCompare offers a one-star to four-star rating of how good the offering is compared with past prices. [Check out some Farecast.com predictions of how airfares will change in the coming week.]

The lowest price available for a round-trip ticket in September between Boston and Miami, for example, was priced yesterday by FareCompare at $198 (not including taxes). That's expensive compared with last year, when the lowest price available for September 2005 was $158. But prices were higher in April, May and June, according to FareCompare. The Web site showed American dropped its lowest price on that route by $80 two weeks ago.

With FareCompare, it takes a few clicks to get available prices on specific dates since the site first offers lowest price in a month, then prices broken down by week. Drill a bit deeper, and you can break down prices by airline on the same route. While Delta Air Lines has consistently charged about $400 for its lowest advance-purchase round trip between Atlanta and Cincinnati over the past three months, prices at Continental Airlines yo-yoed in that market between $100 and $400 in the same period, according to FareCompare. Delta offers nonstop service between its two biggest hubs; Continental offers only connecting flights.

FareCompare, a Dallas company that started doing sophisticated travel data-crunching for businesses then decided to add a consumer site, has accumulated 22 months of prices. The site also tracks first-class and business-class fares, and is a quick way to find "Y-Up" fares -- coach tickets that get you automatic first-class upgrades.

nice! Thanks for the info. wandering!

hehe, god of deals........