-The first thing everyone mentioned about Farecast this morning was the nationwide expansion. A secondary point (if it was even mentioned) was the addition of RSS feeds for particular city pairs for a particular date (in other words, information on the trip you want to take). This should have been the lead story. No other travel search engine provides this service:
Kayak offers email based Fare Alerts where users can set a maximum price, but unfortunately the service looks at a full month (Sep 2006, for example) as opposed to a particular date. FareChase offers a Fare Alert widget, but does not allow the traveler to specify a date or even a date range. Orbitz offers ‘canned’ RSS feeds for deals (flight, car, hotel, etc.) and for specific destinations (Las Vegas, Orlando, New York, etc.), but nothing for a particular date and city pair. Travelocity offers FareWatcher, “a free, personalized subscription service that tracks the best round trip fares published by airlines for up to five city pairs of your choice.” Via email, travelers can get a notification for one of the following: 1) if fares go down by $25 for a city pair, 2) if fares go up or down by $25 for a city pair, 3) when fares go down by a user defined price. The traveler can also opt to just see pricing information in the FareWatcher Summary (in account section). Again, the user can’t specify an exact date range. Expedia has Fare Tracker which doesn’t really allow the user to do much beyond just track a city pair - the information isn’t date specific or fare specific. Not so useful. FareCompare lets you track prices for a city pair through RSS feeds and Widgets, but again, there’s no way to specify trip date.
So who are all these people with completely flexible travel dates who only want to know about a $25 price drop? What Farecast now provides is smart and actionable information for the traveler. Most people know when they have to go to NYC for a wedding or Chicago for Thanksgiving or South Beach for Spring Break. Farecasts’ RSS feeds allow the company to start communicating and building a relationship with potential customers far in advance of the actual trip. And it costs nothing. A marketer’s dream. With this in mind, if I were Farecast, I’d immediately develop a couple FareCompare-esque widgets/gadgets/plugins (Yahoo!, Google, FireFox) to complement this service. Think of Farecasts’ RSS feeds as the Web 2.0 version of SideStep’s Toolbar.
Oh, and here’s another idea…why not ride the coat-tails of the whole back to school blitz - everyone is in buying mode for back to school - why not get students and parents in savings mode for holiday travel? Test the grassroots on-campus marketing thing on college move in days for 5 schools. Oh, and use that MySpace page that you haven’t done anything with yet.
-Ok, now to the story everyone else put first…Farecast expanded to 55 departure cities from the initial 2 (Boston and Seattle). A number of people I talked to early on criticized Farecast for only launching with 2 cities as the company probably lost a lot of potential consumers. With all the travel search options out there, I think it’s risky to launch without a fairly comprehensive product (I’d say the same for shopping search sites). At the same time, Farecase got some nice PR/Buzz in the media and 90% of it might have been wasted as only travelers in Boston and Seattle could use the service. The company now has to convince a lot of people to give it a second shot AND figure out how to generate another round of buzz. On the bright side, I’m sure Farecast learned a lot from going super-local in its initial launch.
In a sign of the times, not one blog I quickly scanned this morning (GigaOm, SearchEngineWatch, SiliconBeat, TechCrunch) wrote anything about the accuracy of Farecast’s predictions. It seems the important thing is to post often and early as opposed to digging into the story. Farecast has been tracking flights departing from Boston and Seattle for a lot longer than flights departing from any other major cities, so Farecast is less confident of its predictions for these additional cities. Ok, before you take this statement and run with it, I’m confident the company wouldn’t have launched with these additional cities if it hadn’t achieved a confidence level it was comfortable with. Just important to note and pay attention to as the company continues to add departure cities.
August 21st, 2006 at 3:19 pm
Setting aside the forecasting feature, which I’m not convinced is or will be particularly useful or accurate, Farecast seems to deliver a service very similar to Kayak’s, via a similar interface. Interestingly though, for me it is delivering fare search results for specific round trips about 50% faster than Kayak does (in around 13 seconds versus 20 seconds). I’m assuming Farecast’s RSS feature will be matched fairly promptly.
I’m seeing Farecast primarily as a faster Kayak.