• Wired, Friday, August 18, 2006 12:35 PM

Don't you hate it when you find out you paid $600 for your flight to San Francisco while someone else paid $300? What about the guy who paid $1,000 for the same flight? This is the world of airline ticket pricing, and it's frustrating. Some new travel sites promise to shed light on this bizarre process to help consumers figure out when it's best to buy. "I once spent six hours combing through different Web sites," says Robert Metcalf, who created flyspy, a travel site that uses fare data from Northwest Airlines. "I ended up compiling all the data I gathered into an Excel spreadsheet, and started wondering why there wasn't a site that provides this kind of functionality." Flyspy analyzes 30 days' worth of fare information in a stock-market style graph. The easy-to-read chart is key to the site's appeal. It enables prospective buyers to comparison shop based on their length of stay, showing them how the price changes if they book a day or two ahead or behind. Clicking a data point brings users directly to Northwest for booking. Seattle-based Farecast actually makes predictions about where the price is going to move, based on past price data. A tested search for flights from Boston to Denver predicted with 80 percent confidence that the lowest fare would jump by at least $50 within a week. Lo and behold, four days later the price shot up $42.

Read the whole story at Wired »