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Comment by lmkg | Hacker News Reader

Bing Travel had predictions for fare fluctuations for air tickets back in 2009. It was pretty awesome back when I flied a lot, but they apparently killed the feature in 2014. Now Google's bringing it back, two years later.

I don't understand the future sometimes. ¯\(°_o)/¯

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Similarly, the article mentions that Google Flights is now more closely competing with Hopper, a mobile app for finding flights. Hopper already offers this price prediction service, and it is powered by Sabre's price prediction API: https://developer.sabre.com/docs/read/rest_apis/air/intellig...

Disclosure: I own another competing flight search tool, https://concorde.io

My issue with Hopper, now I know it is a Sabre limitation, has always been that I can't get predictions based upon more fine grained criteria. For instance knowing that the lowest published fare for a particular departure and return date is going to rise or lower doesn't help me when I am only interested in flights that leave or return between specific times on those days. When I have used Hopper I have not found there is necessarily any strong correlation between shifts in the lowest published fare and other fares.

Even if assume the other fares and the lowest published fare do track there is still an issue. Hopper doesn't/can't track or predict seat availability, so when Hopper gives me a notification that I should continue to wait because prices should fall I can't have any faith that the number of seats I require will be available when they do. This is especially a problem for me because when I fly I am usually purchasing tickets for multiple people.

Given these limitations I find Hopper almost useless for my needs. I would love an app that would allow me to enter a departure date and time window, return date and time window and the number of passengers then provide feedback regarding both future price direction and seat availability. I'm not holding my breath.

I can recommend Hopper, it did save my parents few hundred dollars.

I've waited out a week to get cheaper flights to from Japan to NZ.

Still was a rip-off though - one way cost more than a return layover flights to Eastern Europe.

Well from what I have seen this only says when prices are going up, not down - so it's not that close.

From the first sentence of the API docs:

> The Low Fare Forecast (beta) API forecasts whether the lowest published fare will rise, fall or stay the same within the next 7 days.

That link to Sabre documentation isn't half bad. I was expecting a flaming mess of docs.

Sabre's REST APIs are actually pretty great; they're well-documented and fairly easy to use. The SOAP APIs [0], which contain the real meat (inventory details, PNR lookup, etc) are another story…

[0] https://developer.sabre.com/docs/read/SOAP_APIs

The original service was called Farecast before Microsoft bought them. It used to be very good, but the prediction info gradually became marginalized. We may never know the truth, but it feels as if Microsoft caved to pressure from the airlines.

Farecast and subsequent Bing Travel employee here: I had already moved on by the time the decision was made to discontinue the fare prediction service but I think it was mostly due to the amount of work it took to maintain a high accuracy rate and the large amounts of data we had to ingest to do so. Over time, there were less people from the original team working on it and the data options were limited (ITA was a major source of data) so it was discontinued. Glad to see we were ahead of our time!

Kayak has had it for as long as I can recall, and still does.

Ditto. And FYI, those fare predictions came to Bing when they bought Farecast. Fareast launched in '06, if memory serves.

Edit: Memory served: https://web.archive.org/web/20060630050308/http://farecast.c...

Kayak has this too. I use it all the time.

I use Hopper[1] for that. It has been accurate so far.

[1]https://www.hopper.com/

Yeah, loved the farecast feature of Bing.

The farecast team left and formed Decide, a way predict prices for electronics and other goods. Eventually purchased by ebay.

Bing also had a fantastic thing that let you earn points when shopping through Bing Shopping. That was quickly discontinued as well.

so around 2007-2009 was the actual liberalization in some data regulation related to air travel

nothing novel has happened since then

web services are just easier to use

I think they said they killed it because they said they could no longer be accurate with the rate predictions because airlines started limiting data access and it requiring more staff than it was worth. I used it all the time and was sad when they killed it off. I'm sure Google will abandon this project too in 2-3 years like they do everything else that turns out to not be profitable.

Kayak gives you an estimate of probability of price increase..

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