Here is a very cool website that I just found. It’s called Farecast and you can tell it where you want to go and when and it will give you advice on whether to buy your ticket now or wait to see if prices go down. Of course I have no idea how accurate it is, but it’s kind of fun to play with. It doesn’t work for all cities and your trip has to be between 2 and 8 nights in order for it to make a prediction. It also shows you the fares for most of the airlines and provides information about what times are the least expensive to fly and what sort of frequent flyer rewards the airline offers.

In the past I have used Expedia to get general information about what airlines fly where, but I think I’ll experiment a bit with this web site. We fly a lot on Southwest and I like that Farecast includes Southwest in its search results. It doesn’t include the prices from Southwest, but does let you know that Southwest flies the particular route you are searching for.