Voice of Travel

Should you buy your airfare now, or should you wait? There is a new website FareCast.com, which predicts whether airfare will rise or drop based on pricing trends.

This is a pretty cool website. It doesn’t have that many different locations yet, and is still in beta, but it will help you figure out if you should purchase your tickets now or wait. What it does is take a look at what ticket prices are now, and let you know if it is a good price and you should buy it before it goes up, or if you should wait because the prices should come down. Since we all know that airline ticket prices change constantly, this sounds like it will really help us purchase the lowest airline prices!

I decided to test it out using Las Vegas as an example since I have flown there many times and know the prices I have paid in the past. I will be flying out of Newark, and picked a random date in the middle of January. It showed me the prices ($267 was the best price), and said that the prices should remain steady for the next 7 days. It recommended that I purchase now, looking at past history since the graph above the prices shows that this is the lowest price in the past 41 days, and the average low is only $276. It even gives you a percentage of how confident they are with the predictions, this one being 74%.

Since we’ve all been in the situation where we see a price for airline tickets and don’t know if we should purchase them now or wait and hope the prices don’t skyrocket, this is a really great tool! I’ll be playing around with this in the future, especially as they add more cities.

• FareCast.com