ThruIT » kayak http://thruit.com Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:39:47 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Traveling Soon? Meet the Bing Price Predictor http://thruit.com/2009/12/traveling-soon-meet-the-bing-price-predictor/ http://thruit.com/2009/12/traveling-soon-meet-the-bing-price-predictor/#comments Thu, 03 Dec 2009 13:41:24 +0000 Zach Schmid http://thruit.com/?p=675 With the holiday season fast approaching many of us will soon begin frantically searching the internet to find the cheapest airfare available to book that last minuet trip back home. In the past, when I've begun my search I've always went to Kayak.com . Kayak does a great job of scraping almost every airline website and sites similar to it such as Hotwire, Expedia and Travelocity. Even though I know Kayak is searching all of these sites for me, even after it gives me the best available rate, I'm still always left with the question “If I buy this ticket tomorrow will it be cheaper?”. Up until this point there has been no easy way to answer this question without testing your luck and holding off on purchasing your ticket... until today.]]> BingWith the holiday season fast approaching many of us will soon begin frantically searching the internet to find the cheapest airfare available to book that last minuet trip back home. In the past, when I’ve begun my search I’ve always went to Kayak.com . Kayak does a great job of scraping almost every airline website and sites similar to it such as Hotwire, Expedia and Travelocity. Even though I know Kayak is searching all of these sites for me, even after it gives me the best available rate, I’m still always left with the question “If I buy this ticket tomorrow will it be cheaper?”. Up until this point there has been no easy way to answer this question without testing your luck and holding off on purchasing your ticket… until today.

About two months back I was introduced to a new travel website called Bing Travel (http://www.bing.com/travel). Bing is Microsoft’s third iteration of what used to be MSN Search … Errr I mean Live Search. When I first visited the Bing travel website I assumed that there wouldn’t be anything incredibly unique that would help distinguish Bing Travel from competitors such as Kayak. However, I still decided to give it a chance and to my surprise it was a lot more than I expected. Not only when I searched for a flight did it find me the best available rate, but it also gave me the answer to the question I’ve never had the answer to. Bing gave me a 7-day Price predictor for the current flight, whether it thought the price was going to go up or down,how confident it was in this price change, and finally a recommendation as to whether I should buy or wait for a cheaper price.Bing-price

Working in the IT industry, I was curious as to how exactly Bing is able to do this. According to the Bing website, they make this prediction by data mining more than 175 billion historical airfare observations which then allows them to provide a recommendation and confidence interval based on the data.

Pretty cool stuff, and definitely something that Microsoft is pioneering in the travel industry. It will be interesting to see how the competition expands and improves upon this concept in the months and years to come to give customers even more usable information.
Link: http://www.bing.com/travel

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