Today’s Daily Dose of Thrifty is dealing with travel by air. We are coming up on the season for holiday travel plans and now is the time to start hunting for the best deals.
Quite a while ago, we started using a website called Farecast.com which is now known as Bing.com. Farecast.com allowed you to put in your travel dates for air travel and the site would provide a travel forecast (or farecast) attempting to give you an idea of when to buy your airline tickets. It is the same idea behind a weather forecast, they might not always be right, but it gives you a good indication of what the upcoming weather is probably going to be.
Now that its switched over to Bing.com, we can still say that we love this site and the airfare farecast features. Several months in advance, you can plug-in your intended travel dates and times and then track when the airline prices rise and fall – with Bing.com predicting the best time to buy. When they give you a farecast, the site also indicates how confident they are in their prediction based on a percentage. For example: “Wait to buy the tickets with a 76% confidence that the price will go lower,” etc.
In addition, they use a red arrow saying “wait to purchase as the price is probably going to decrease” and then will show an orange, yellow, light green all the way to dark green arrow and the dark green arrow indicates “don’t wait and buy now, we predict this price to be the lowest!”
You can also sign-up for email alerts from the Bing website so when the price hits a good farecast you will be immediately notified. In addition, set multiple travel destinations/dates to monitor. Finally, you can also compare leaving at a different date or different departure/arrival locations, which may help reduce your travel costs significantly.
There is also a newer feature called “rate indicator” which will give you an idea of how good of a deal a hotel rate is – this is a part of the site we haven’t explored much, but if it works along the same principle as the air travel, then this would probably be a very useful tool as well!
Share with us any other tricks either with Bing.com or other methods you use to get cheap airfare. And start scoping out the lowest airfare now so you can save a bundle this holiday season!
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