Computers Confuse Me Blog

update 4/17/2007: Farecast is now owned by Microsoft.

Find the cheapest airfare for your next vacation or trip back home quickly and easily using the Kayak.com and Farecast.com flight search engines.

Search for flights on Farecast.com you’ll get the current airfare from multiple airlines and travel agencies sorted from lowest to highest. You can quickly and easily see which airlines will get you the best price. Farecast.com is not a travel agency so they do not sell the tickets themselves. Instead they link you directly to the source (airline, travel agency, etc.) website to purchase your tickets, ensuring you get the cheapest rate. The name Farecast.com comes from their fare prediction feature which shows the trend of the lowest fares over the last 30 days and predicts whether the price will rise or lower. The Farecast.com prediction comes with a percent confidence level to help you decide if you should buy now or wait a few days. The prediction feature is only available for flights within 90 days of the current date.

The site works great and I love the prediction engine, however I’ve recently noticed they tend to favor orbits.com over the airlines themselves. The prices have always been withing a few dollars (assuming Orbits markup for profit) to and from the cities I fly, but I’ve began loosing a little confidence and in this site and I tend to prefer Kayak.com lately. However, the prediction feature is kind of nice so I still tend to use Farecast.com to help me decide whether or not I should wait a few days before purchasing.

Farecast.com also provides a new hotel search featuring “Rate Key”. Rate Key compares a hotels current rate with its past rates and lets you know if it’s a deal, just average or not a deal. The hotel search is still a beta product which means it’s available for use but is not yet complete and may contain bugs.

Kayak.com works in the same manner as Farecast.com but it does not seem to favor any one site over others. You start by entering the start and end city or airport, Choose the dates and time frame for your flight and whether or not you also want to search the surrounding airports. Kayak.com will then search hundreds of travel sites worldwide and return the current flight fares for your selection sorted from lowest to highest.

Along the left side of the search results page you have multiple customization options to help you narrow your search even further (Farecast also has this). Here are just a few of options you have:

• Hate connecting flights? Uncheck the boxes for 1 and 2+ stops so you only see nonstop flights.
• Uncheck all airlines where you’re not part of their mileage program?
• Add or remove nearby airports?
• Set a maximum price to eliminate the fares that are higher than your budget.

The best part about the customizations is how fast these changes take place, the page never has to reload. Just check or uncheck boxes and the results are modified right in front of you. Searching for flights couldn’t be any easier.

One of my favorite recent additions to the Kayak.com website is the “Weekend” search option. During the initial search criteria you have the option to check a box called “Weekend”. This feature is great if your just looking for a cheap weekend to fly but don’t care which weekend it is. After selecting the weekend feature simply enter start and end locations and then choose between “upcoming weekends” or select the month you would like to fly. Next you set the day you would like to leave (Thursday or Friday) and return (Sunday or Monday). Kayak.com then goes out returns to you the fares from hundreds of airlines and travel agencies matching your criteria, all sorted by price. After Kayak.com creates it’s initial list of airfares you can begin customizing to to narrow your search criteria.

Kayak.com is not only a search engine for cheap flights but can also assist with finding the cheapest price for other travel needs such as hotels, cruises, and rental cars.

Minimize the stress of planning your next trip by visiting the Farecast.com and Kayak.com search engines to find the cheapest airline fares.

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