Ok so I’ve been on the Farecast Private Beta, an airline fare prediction tool, for less than a week now thanks to Mark and I kind of like what I’ve seen so far, but to be honest there’s still quite a lot of limitations.

Now I know this is a very early private beta (invite only) but I think they really need to start focusing on getting some other major cities from other places in the world added, London, Paris, and Rome etc.

Once they have done that then I can start some real beta testing that isn’t restricted to cities I haven’t flown to or from before!

Current limitations of the Farecast Private Beta include:

• Only Seattle and Boston Searchable Farecast plans to add more markets and will eventually cover all major markets in the US and around the globe, something that many of us will be wating to see.
• Only Roundtrip Airfare Available Farecast plans to add one-way and multi-city shopping capabilities in the futrure.
• Not All of the Lowest Prices Most of these issues should be resolved soon but sometimes during the beta, you may find that Farecast is missing an itinerary or a price that you found on an airline site or even a competitor site that was low and didnt appear on Farecast, things like this take time but will eventually improve.
• Improvement Needed on Links to Airline Booking During this beta, Farecast is investing heavily in technology to improve the transition from Farecast to the airline website but like a lot of the other limitacions with this beta, it’s better that they slowly implement it than implement everything in one.
• Browser Incompatibilities – Farecast plans to support more browsers eventually but for the time being, Farecast is optimized for use only with certain browsers. For windows, they are: Firefox (1.5 or higher) and Internet Explorer (5.5 or higher) and for Mac users, they are recommending using Firefox (1.5 or higher).
• Site performance issues, such as site outages, server busy errors, and slow search times.

Ohh and by the way before I forget, I do have Farecast Private Beta Invites, so if you would like a Farecast Private Beta Invite just leave me a comment asking for one and I’ll send you one.