A fare chance for all

Good news if you want to find the best airfare deal flying to or from Spokane: The nifty travel site Farecast.com has added Spokane to its list of cities.

Farecast, launched this past summer, is an advanced data-mining travel Web site that tries to tell travelers the best times to book tickets to various locations.

It started with 55 cities, and in the past few weeks added Spokane to the list of locations covered by its computer predictions.

Numerous Web sites – like Kayak – scour the Web and point you to the lowest prices. Farecast tries instead to predict the way prices are going, recognizing that airlines are constantly revising prices to reflect supply and demand.

It works this way: you choose a travel date and ask Farecast to analyze the fares. It produces a list of fares, from cheapest to most expensive. If the travel dates are between two and eight days from now, it produces a fare prediction; prices will either go up in the next week or they’ll drop. Historically, for all the cities Farecast covers, the batting average has been about 75 percent correct, according to Mike Fridgen, the company’s vice president of marketing.

Farecast displays a line graph summarizing the recent history of fares for that trip, indicating the ups and downs as airlines have adjusted rates. The site allows refining the search to limit or broaden choices based on times of day, number of stops and number of tickets.

One way the site makes money is to allow you to book the ticket directly through Farecast.

The algorithms used by the site were the result of a team of coders originally hired by Oren Etzioni, a University of Washington computer science professor. Etzioni has launched other earlier Web search applications, including MetaCrawler and Netbot, one of the Web’s first online shopping comparison sites (since acquired by Excite).

So far the main drawback is the absence of fares from Southwest Airlines. Hugh Crean, the CEO of Farecast, said its absence from the database makes no substantial difference, as all other airlines react to Southwest’s rates by adjusting their own fares. JetBlue’s discount fares are included in Farecast’s system, he noted.

Another notable feature on Farecast, for those who want to fly on a whim, is a choice called Flexible Fare. It lets you see the full range of same-day ticket prices, ranked from cheapest to most expensive, from any city for which Farecast tracks data. From Seattle, for instance, the cheapest one-way choice, not booked in advance, is $99 to fly to Spokane. The most expensive: $499 to Fairbanks.