Farecast: The Science of Predicting Airline Ticket Pricing

Who hasn’t had this happen before? You scour the Web to find the best price on an airline flight and you purchase the ticket. A couple of days later you happen to find out that the same ticket on the same flight is being sold for $100 less or $100 more. How is that possible? How can you make sense of it all?

On the surface, airline ticket pricing seems to be an exercise in randomness. Airlines seemingly change their prices at a whim. This leads to no source of frustration for us, the traveler. All we care about is getting to our destination for the best possible price.

The randomness of it all is, in fact, not so random. At least according to the folks who put together the fascinating website – Farecast. Using historical data and up to the minute trending information, they are able to predict when the price of an airline ticket will go up and when it will go down. They claim that their predications are 75% accurate. Even if they turn out to be less accurate, having a tool to help make sense of it all could come in handy for those of us who obsess over airline ticket prices.

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