Monday, August 28, 2006

Funundrum Recommends

Anyone familiar with McSweeney's will realize that I've completely ripped off this idea from them, but I don't think anyone will much care. In the first installment of the Funundrum Recommends feature, I'd like to bring to your attention a fascinating site called Farecast. It's a dream for airfare geeks like me.

The idea of Farecast is that you put in your desired itinerary, and their magical algorithms do a little dance, look at the history of ticket prices in the last 90 days, and tell you whether to buy your ticket now or to wait, depending on whether there is a lower price expected in the near future.

It is so cool. There are lots of charts and the ability to tweak your options, right there on the results page. That's huge for the aforementioned airfare geeks (me) who like to fiddle around with departing airports and days to find a better price.

For now, Farecast is still in beta and only does US cities, but I'm really looking forward to it being something big. If not, it's still a really fun toy that lets me feel smarter about my airfare decisions.

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