Back in August, we noted an interesting website called Farecast, which makes predictions about whether airfares will move up, down, or stay the same. This could let buyers lock in low rates if fares are about to increase, or wait if it looks like fares will fall. In addition to the current price, predicted direction of the fares, Farecast also offers a confidence metric, a percentage chance that they think their prediction is right. The critical question is “how accurate is that confidence metric?”
Now Farecast is putting their money where their virtual mouth is by offering a guarantee. TechCrunch reports:
If Farecast tells you a ticket’s price is going to drop and recommends that you wait, you can pay the Fare Guard fee to lock in access to the lowest price of that day for the next week. If you have purchased Fare Guard and the price instead goes up, Farecast will send you the difference between what you ended up having to pay and the price you locked in with them. If Farecast’s prediction was correct and the price does drop, you can buy the ticket at the lower price and they make $10 from the Fare Guard service.
OK, so it’s not really about pricing, but when people go to this much trouble to figure out your pricing, we’ll make a note of it here.
One Comment
Jon
Reuben,
The other thing thats happened since your original posting is that there are hundreds of city-pairs on the site now. Previously there was only markets ex Seattle & Boston.
And I tend to disagree with your comment that “its not really about pricing”. Price guarantees have everything to do with pricing. One example: if you have 2+ competitors offering price guarantees, it been shown that prices will tend to converge more than if there were no guarantees.
Regards,
Jon