To buy, or not to buy...

Trying to purchase airline tickets at the cheapest price has always been a tricky cat-and-mouse game. Buy too early, and you could miss out on a last-minute sale. Buy too late, and the cheap seats may all be gone.

Help is on the way from Farecast.com.



Farecast takes much of the guesswork out of deciding when to actually make your ticket purchase. Using sophisticated prediction and modeling technologies, Farecast determines whether a particular fare is likely to go up or to go down from now until the time you plan to fly. Still in beta testing (the site only works for flights to/from Boston and to/from Seattle), the site provides you with a "Fare Prediction" and "Fare History" for your route—and here's the coolest part—suggests whether you should BUY NOW or WAIT to purchase your tickets. Plus there's a flexible search function that lets you compare fares for a 30-day period so you can see the cheapest days to fly. Finally, the site shows you actual fares for your trip, along with links for making your final booking. Which means there are none of those added booking fees that some other sites charge.

Check out Farecast.com today. And while you're there, be sure to VOTE for your favorite/home airport to help ensure it will be one of the first added to the site as it expands in the future.