Webware

Farecast, the site that tells you when to buy your airline tickets to get the best price, has finally added international routes to its service. This feature would have been great back before the dollar took its tumble against world currencies, and a family dinner in Paris didn't cost $300. (See: Farecast: Out of beta, but still U.S.-only.)

The data on the service appears to be filling out slowly. While there is historical pricing for the airfares of US-Europe and US-Mexico/Caribbean city pairs, the actual fare predictions are not all there. I tried to price a San Francisco-Paris flight and found that buying advice was not available for the return date I wanted based on the departure I chose.

Predictions only work for flights or round-trips originating in the U.S. You Europeans, you get a good enough deal coming here already. No Farecast for you.

Still, Farecast is a great Web 2.0 service. It's good to see it adding more useful data. If you want to really get out of town, you don't have to head all the way to Europe, use it to price tickets to Mexico.

One of our favorite sites, the airfare prediction site Farecast, is spreading its wings today and launching a beta pricing service for hotels as well. The service works for the top 30 U.S. travel destinations.

Using hotel inventory data from partner sites Orbitz, Cheaptickets, and ReserveTravel, as well as from its own historical database, Farecast can now tell you which hotels in the area you're looking to book are good deals, and which are not. And, just as it does with airfares, Farecast can tell you which hotels' prices are likely to be better if you change the dates of your stay.

Step 1: Find the red hotels at your destination. Those are the good deals.

Farecast displays hotels that match your search on a Microsoft-powered map. Bookings that are good deals (reservations that cost less than they normally do for the particular hotel) are color-coded in red. Poor deals are in blue. If you click on any hotel, you get a graph that shows how the hotel's prices fluctuate over the days before and after your trip.

It's interesting that Farecast doesn't color-code by price, but rather by amount of discount from the historical average. Thus a $400 booking can be a better "deal" than a $200 hotel--however, the high-priced lodging is likely to be at a five-star hotel, while the cheaper room can be found at a lower-quality location.

The system will let you know, visually, if you're traveling at a bad time. If all the hotels you're looking at are bad deals, there's a good chance that there's an event in town that's driving up prices. Farecast also has data about local events, Farecast's Mike Fridgen told me, but it doesn't display this information in this beta.

This new hotel price-finder feature is quite useful, and Farecast does an extremely good job of displaying its data and predictions. I would recommend using it for your next booking.

(The one thing I really would like to see added is integration with Farecast's airfare system. It'd be even more useful if the site could combine airfare and hotel info to help you pick the best dates for a trip. That's on the road map, Fridgen said.)

Somewhat related: Rentometer (review) and Zillow (previous coverage).

Microsoft has been pretty busy today, adding two third-party services to its consumer and business brands. The first is a new integration with Farecast [coverage] on MSN's travel site. Users get a new module, containing airfare predictions and deals, that offers a listing of cheap airfares as well as an airport finder. Instead of jettisoning you out to Farecast's site, it will open up right inside of MSN--similar to opening up an app in Facebook.

On the business end, Microsoft has added the option to buy search keywords on Ask.com via Microsoft Office Live's adManager service. Office Live users will be able to get keyword advertising on both Ask.com and Live Search using the same platform.

Vayama is a new airfare-ticket-finding service the likes of Expedia, Priceline and Travelocity. However, instead of focusing on domestic travel, Vayama is marketing itself as a provider for international flights. The service is also beginning to build what looks like a people-powered travel tips section to help newbie travelers with the post-airport journey into foreign cities that can often be confusing.

To begin any travel search, users can enter their data as usual, or use Vayama's neat touch-and-go map, which lets you zoom into various parts of the world to select arrival and departure cities. The map is powered by Microsoft Virtual Earth and is a nice way to see where airports are geographically located without having to look them up elsewhere. Each airport's dot is also proportionately sized for how big it is in real life. Large international airports such as LAX and JFK have big dots, whereas some of the stateside and municipal airports get tiny ones.

Once you've found your tickets, you can pick out your seat with Vayama's seat finder, which is presented in a slightly angled 3-D image. Seat finders for plane travel is certainly nothing new, but it's fairly simple to visually see the open and full seats--and even cooler to click an open seat and see yourself appear.

Before buying any tickets, you can also do some brief research on any city, which will show you how much it costs (in U.S. dollars) to get to and from the airport, as well as around selected cities using private or public transportation. To make those numbers a little more accurate, Vayama is building out its own people-powered reviews network, where users can dish on city information in exchange for discount credits on airfare.

In my brief testing this afternoon, some of the fares I searched for were very competitive with those I found on some of the major providers. Vayama was also a little faster in the search, although not nearly as comprehensive as my personal favorite flight-finder, Kayak.com, which found the lowest prices of the bunch.

One of the big things missing is a way to check if you're currently getting the best deal on your ticket, or whether it's worth waiting for a price drop; something you can do with Farecast, although not for international flights. Like any Internet shopping experience, ticket services like this are useful, but it never hurts to check the competition--especially when their mascots are gnomes and William Shatner.

To see a shot of the 3-D seat finder, keep reading.

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Airline price predictor Farecast is officially out of beta today. We've covered the service before and think it's great. New features that have been recently added include FareGuard, which lets you buy insurance on FareCast's predictions (the company claims "predictive accuracy of 74.5 percent"), a "flight quality" selector that lets you eliminate nasty red-eyes from your predictions, an alert feature that will e-mail you when the cost of a ticket to a destination you desire appears at or below a price you specify, and my favorite newish feature, a grid that shows you how the cost of a round trip varies depending on the length of your stay.

Webware editors have personal experience with FareCast, and we confirm that it can indeed save you money. I have an issue with the service, though: It offers fare prediction for only U.S. airports. For me, overseas vacation destinations are more desirable. And since flying to Europe or Asia is also a lot more expensive than a hop to Orlando, I'm eager for the service to go global.

Wipbox is a relatively new service that helps people sell things on Craigslist and eBay. Wipbox charges a small fee to help you put together a really slick-looking listing and figure out some of the subtle aspects of getting an item to sell quickly based on what category and service it's listed in. If you've ever wanted to sell something on either of the two classifieds services but have been unsure about a good starting price or the best way to convey the product information, Wipbox does the heavy lifting for you.

To get started quickly, you can do a search for your item. It's not free at $0.25 a pop, but it gives you the starting and closing costs for your item in various categories (for eBay) or locales (for Craigslist). For example, if you're here in San Francisco, your item might fetch more money in surrounding neighborhoods. Likewise, on eBay, putting it in a different category can dramatically improve the closing price. You're paying Wipbox to do the legwork.

In testing, we came across some skewed numbers for certain search items. For eBay, it was likely due to auctioneers incorrectly labeling their items or adding extra words to their titles to boost search engine presence. For Craigslist, we ran into problems with the search grouping together multiple SKUs. For example, a search for an Xbox 360 pulled in results with a difference of about a hundred dollars due to the system having two versions, each at a different price. For popular items such as iPods though, drilling down to the specific model number helped with these issues.

Wipbox bases its statistics on 30 days of eBay listings, and a full week of Craigslist sales, so whatever information you're getting is fairly current for market value. To find general price ranges for online auctions, there's also Mpire, a service that tracks auction prices on eBay to show you whether or not it's in demand--a little bit like Farecast does for airplane tickets.

The real catch to using Wipbox is its listing creator. Wipbox will pull in a description, user reviews, and specifics from Amazon.com. You can either pay $0.15 to have this information posted straight to your listing, or copy and paste the code field by field into eBay or Craigslist's listing creation box for free.

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Farecast, an airline ticket prediction and purchasing service, has launched a new Deals section that helps people find the best prices on tickets within a 90-day window. Unlike the recently launched Fare Guard, the Deals section is completely free and competes with other discount travel sites like TravelZoo and CheapTickets to aggregate flights that sell for a fraction of their typical cost. The service is currently limited to 38 major airports in the United States.

The search results are separated by the best deals, last-minute flights, weekend and weeklong flights, and flights for families. There's also a section for the best deals nationwide to recommend to friends or family members elsewhere. Each deal has an arrow icon that tells you what's happening to the fare's price in the near future, along with a recommendation for or against a purchase.

The defining difference between Farecast Deals and other deals sites is content aggregation. Whereas other sites can get their deals from tipsters and marketers, Farecast actually populates them from its own data. Farecast claims it would take someone "50,000 individual searches" to find the deals they do, and that's just for one city. Give the new service a spin here.

Getting burned on airline ticket-price increases stinks. Today, the ticket-price guesstimating site Farecast (our initial Farecast coverage here) rolled out a new feature called Fare Guard. This $10-per-ticket service lets you lock down the lowest price provided by Farecast for seven days. If the price of the ticket goes up during that time, you can still purchase it at the original, locked price.

In essence Fare Guard is ticket-price travel insurance. Unfortunately, while the service covers any fare increases, it recompenses your expenses after the fact. That means you'll be waiting for a check in the mail from Farecast to make up the price differential. The service promises to have the check out to you within seven days, but it would be nice if it were simply taken off of the original purchase price.

Fare Guard is currently on sale for $3 per ticket until the end of the month.