"With Farecast, we answer the questions, should I buy now or should I wait”

The user interface is very clear and the usabilty is high. Icons show you if your holiday becomes affordable or your business tripo realy nessessary or not.

Farecast collected not only 175 billion airfare observations since May 2006 but also lots of awards for his innovative approach. It belongs to the TIMEs 50 Coolest Sites as well as to the KiplingersTop 25 Travel Sites and some others. Farecast changed from beta to public in May 2007 and added a hotel prices system in August 2007. I bet Car Rental is coming next.

The Fareguard is truly the most innovative feature Farecast came up with earlier this year. For a 10$ fee you can “lock in” and fix an air fare for one week. If the price drops, Farecast lets you know to buy the cheaper ticket, if the prices rises, Farecast pays you the difference. Good deal you may say and its reminds me to a insurance what itdeffenately not is because the Fare Guard doesn’t protect you from any bad circumstances caused by the airline. Very interessting is that a travel page called GoFox offers a quite similar system also called Fare Guard. I wonder if this is the same system or both forgot the trademark the name.

The system was developed by Oren Etzioni an University of Washington Professor. He also collected more than $7 million in venture funding from Greylock Partners, Madrona Venture Group and WRF Capital. And it seems that they invested again in a company with very good prospects. And expeditious other startups mushroom all over the world to catch a piece of the travel cake for example kayak.com oder sidestep.co.uk. But no one could realy battle the Farecast prediction system or even the Fare Guard protection.

So I m looking forward when it comes to Europe…