Say you are looking for a deal on an airline flight. The Internet abounds with offers for low fares. You can find them on the major Internet travel agent sites like Orbitz, Travelocity or on more specialized sites like Cheaptickets.com or Sidestep.com.
Those can be useful, but they have limits. How do you know, for instance, that that low fare really is a deal? A number of Web sites have recently been created that specialize in spotting true bargains. All of them do what any bargain hunter is supposed to do: watch the marketplace for anomalies, whether they are money-saving air tickets, discount hotel rooms or frequent-flier bonuses.
Farecast.com, which gathered a following with technology that enables it to predict the direction of airfares on a particular route, is back with another innovation that it says can distinguish the best deals in air travel.
Hugh Crean, the chief executive of the Seattle company, said, “We flipped the deal concept.” He said that to determine whether a deal was anything more than a marketing tool, the Web site mined its database of airfares to look for good prices relative to others and those in the past.
What makes this an ideal task for computers, he said, is that a person looking for the best fare for a flight on a particular day from, say, San Francisco, would have to study 600 possibilities from each of the area’s three major airports. Since it was already tracking price data from airlines, Farecast was not daunted by the amount of information.
“We are the only ones who look at everything every day,” Mr. Crean said. Artificial intelligence was all that was needed to spot the deals.
On its site, a person goes to the Farecast Deals section and clicks on the departure city and a list of deals pops up. Each entry includes an explanation, like “record low” or “save $249 off the average low.”
For More:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/07/business/07money.html?em&ex=1176264000&en=f3890c393d8c85d5&ei=5087%0A
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