A vote of “fair” cast for Farecast

I got my beta invitation to try out Farecast, a new service that helps you plan flights (thanks TechCrunch). For the beta, they only provide info on flights from Seattle or Boston, but my home airport is Seattle so no problem there. This service does at least two things better than Expedia and Travelocity:

1. After you get all results for your specified dates, you can easily narrow down the results by the number of stops, by airline and by departure or return time. Beside each of those criteria they display the price ranges included. As you click those options, the list of flights updates without refreshing the entire page (they didn’t mince on their offerings to the AJAX gods), so finding the best flight for your schedule is a much nicer experience than scrolling through eight and a half miles of results on one of the other services looking for the best schedule/fare combination.
2. Farecast predicts whether the prices on the tickets you selected are likely to increase, decrease, or stay the same over the next seven days. This is their tag line feature (“Know When to Buy”), the source of their punnishing name, and what really sets them apart. No more wondering whether you should buy right away or wait for a last-minute special. You can even start off with a 30-day range of travel dates and they’ll graph the expected prices for flights on those dates.

On the down side,

1. As Arrington noted, even though Farecast includes flights for Southwest, they aren’t allowed to include the prices for those flights. So, you still have to visit southwest.com separately to compare.
2. You can’t book your selected flight directly on the Farecast web site. Instead, they link you to the airline’s web site. They tell you how this is an advantage while you’re sitting there waiting for the other site to load. Once you land there, you have to go though that site’s reservation pages all over again. So be sure to note the flight numbers before you make the jump. Not a smooth trip, people.

I will definitely use this service when planning flights. The two strengths noted above make that worthwhile. If Farecast can overcome the two weaknesses I mentioned, their competitors will have to respond with features to match their strengths, or start losing customers.