Web 2.0 Award Winners

Wow what a collection of great websites! The one I spent the most time on, Farecast, was awesome. It's a travel website and it works on the same basic premise as websites like expedia or orbitz, which allow you to search multiple airline websites to find the lost airfare prices to a destination. Farecast does all that and it has one feature which really sets it above the rest, it can predict w/ reasonable accuracy if the price of a plane ticket will rise or fall in the near future. Farecast keeps track of increases and drops in price over the last month and somehow uses that information to project the price in the near future. The website claimed it had been third-party certified as being accurate in its predictions 76% of the time. I decided to do little test of my own. I've been looking for a cheap plane ticket to somewhere for memorial day weekend. After a couple of searches I latched on to San Diego, $225 round trip that's a great price for a ticket somewhere over memorial day weekend. If I had found that price on expedia I would have booked right away, because in my mind that price could only go up from there, but fareast predicted that there was 68% chance the price would drop further, a 20% chance it would stay the same and only a 12% chance that it would increase. So against my better judgment I waited. And guess what today that same $225 ticket costs $203 and farecast is predicting the price will rise (48%) or stay the same (33%), so I'll be buying my ticket today. Thanks (Farecast and web 2.0) for making my life $22 (one seafood dinner) better!