frequent flyer

i've been doing so much travel scheduling recently that i've come upon some interesting websites. aside from the usual travel websites (travelocity, kayak, priceline, etc) i've found an airline prediction blog that may be very helpful:

Farecast

basically for the ardent taekwondoist, travel is about monthly trips to tournaments. it's hard to plan your trips too long before it happens, because you don't necessarily know the schedule, but get too close to the date and the fares spike up. despite trying to buy tickets ahead of time, you still never know when the best time to buy is - i've definitely bought thanksgiving tickets when i panicked and thought fares were rising, only to have them drop in the middle of the next week.

recently i've noticed this little chart called the fare history chart, from kayak.com:



It reminds me of playing the stock market...you wish you had bought earlier, you're sure you're at the peak of the prices now and it wouldn't be wise to buy, but WHAT IF the prices keeps going up?

so now, even though i already bought a ticket, i'm going to keep watching farecast (hehe what a clever name) and see if it WORKS. if it does, current predictions are that my fares are dropping $50 or more in the next week, and i'll probably be sad but not that sad because my tickets were around that price anyways. but if it does work, then i'll try to play the airline pricing game. now be glad that the stock market doesn't have a simple fare predictor like this one, because then you'd get fools like me trusting a little indicator for all their decisions.