Farecast: Know When to Buy
For the cheapest airline fares and hot travel deals, try Farecast, now in private beta.
Imagine, for a moment, that you wanted to travel at the end of July from Seattle to PHX for a weeklong conference. You’d zip over to Farecast, and it would be able to tell you which airline were at their optimal prices at the time, and whether or not the price was likely to significantly change over the next few days. Here’s an example:
As you can see, it issues a recomendation for you to buy, followed by the degree of accuracy of the prediction, and a very pretty looking chart. How do they do it? On their technology page, they say:
We use data-mining algorithms to search for patterns, in the accumulated airfare data, which are associated with significant price changes. These patterns are represented and stored in models, and the models are then rigorously trained. Once created and trained, we use these models to predict the future. Then, new, current airfares can be scored by the model to answer the question, “Is the price going up or down in the future?”
In other words, they probably are training neural networks per route to learn seasonal patterns to pricing data, and then to keep them accurate, using feedback between their simulated passengers and what the next day actually becomes. Very cool, in my opinion. The only thing stopping me from using Farecast for buying airplane tickets now is that it only covers routes from Seattle, WA or Boston, MA. Since I live in neither location, it’s just a pretty toy.
This entry was posted on Saturday, June 3rd, 2006 at 12:33 am and is tagged with cheapest airline fares, training neural networks, private beta, weeklong conference, airplane tickets, pretty toy, farecast, seasonal patterns, recomendation, technology page, hot travel, price changes, seattle wa, data mining, airfares, airfare, few days, travel deals, accuracy, boston ma. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
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