Just a heads up, Kayak implemented 'price predictions' into their search engine today.
They claim to be doing statistical analysis of '1 billion previous airfare searches' to try and predict if you should buy now, or wait. Although I'm not sure how meaningful airfare prices from 2010 would be in regards to prices in 2013.
It's similar to what Bing / Microsoft integrated into their search engine, when they bought FareCast. That technology was allegedly audited by an independent company and found to be accurate about 75% of the time.
I'm not entirely convinced of it's usefulness. These days, airfare prices for the most part are very efficiently priced. When there is a substantial drop on the major airlines, it's usually the result of an airline not quite seeing the demand levels they had expected to fill their seats, and then often times their competitors will react to this drop and lower their prices as well. So it's based on events that aren't exactly predictable or based on what has happened last year.
On the charter airlines, it's usually a case of the airline dropping prices to fill some last minute space on the plane, which may or may not happen, depending on the demand they saw. I do find the charter airlines to be a little more predictable based on what they've done before.
Using an example from the question posted by Brannigan's Law recently:
Quote:
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So for a 2nd half of September to early October trip you'd suggest waiting for Air Transat or Condor to drop their prices around late August early September?
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A Kayak search to London around those dates:
http://www.kayak.com/flights#/YYC-LO...10-09-flexible
The price trend (top left) looks like this:
Kayak says to 'buy now' with 64% confidence that prices may rise by more than $20 in the next 7 days.
A couple of things:
- Not sure how useful it is to try and predict whether prices will rise or fall in the next 7 days. Especially by only $20. I don't think that necessarily indicates a trend, or is all that useful in determining whether this is the right moment in the entire calendar year to buy.
- Wouldn't it be more useful to analyze at what point(s) in the previous year prices were discounted to the destination in question on the dates you're looking to travel this year?
Anyways, if you're looking for some sort of help with whether you should buy now or wait, it's a source of data you can use to help make that decision.
Apparently not all destinations have enough data to display the price trend details.