Farecast.com, a startup in Seattle, which has attracted $8.5 million in venture capital, has a business strategy that promises to help leisure travellers find out when to book airfares to get the lowest prices. This strategy is based on the belief that w

Published: 26 Jul 2005

Farecast.com, a startup in Seattle, which has attracted $8.5 million in venture capital, has a business strategy that promises to help leisure travellers find out when to book airfares to get the lowest prices. This strategy is based on the belief that w

According to Travel Weekly, Farecast, which ironically was previously known as Hamlet (“to buy or not to buy"), hopes to patent a ‘predictive technology.’ This technology is based on data-mining, that will identify patterns in millions of air fares on particular routes and will then tell leisure travellers when to book their flights.

Farecast’s technology concept comes from its founder Oren Etzioni, a University of Washington computer science professor, Travel Weekly continues. He was a co-founder of Netbot, a comparison-shopping site since acquired by Excite. The President and Chief Executive Officer of the organisation is Hugh Crean, previously Senior Vice President of Business Development at NLG and a former Vice President of product development at Priceline.

The latest capital infusion of $7 million evidently came from a new investor, Greylock Partners, and two existing backers, Madrona Venture Group and WRF Capital, which had led an initial round of $1.5 million in 2004.