Fareboom.com is a project by Best Travel Store Inc., a US-based online travel agency. It has been developed by the AltexSoft team in order to substitute an older version of the company’s booking service.
One of the major product updates that needed to be delivered by our team was Fareboom Price Predictor. The goal was to implement an innovative fare forecast feature on top of the company’s existing travel booking engine. Price Predictor had to complement the core search functionality and help users make better purchasing decisions. It needed to be designed for the price sensitive customer to target the best possible time to buy an airline ticket over several months.
Since Microsoft withdrew its Bing flight predictor feature from the Travel portal in 2014, major market players have been trying to take its place. While other services, such as Kayak fare predictor and Skyscanner, offer similar fare movement forecast options, the niche is still highly competitive as there is always room for improvement.
Armed with 10+ years of experience in the travel industry, our client has decided to enter the competition in order to provide users with better customer service and more price saving opportunities. The goal was to build an intelligent algorithm, able to forecast future price movements based on historical data and smart predictive analytics models.
The project consisted of several tasks:
The FareBoom Price Predictor tool was developed within 6 months by a dedicated team, consisting of a Data Scientist, a UX/UI Designer, and 2 Software Engineers.
The prediction algorithm was developed using the R programming language and then converted to C# to comply with the product. Additionally, we have applied the following techniques: Data Mining, Data Aggregation and Extrapolation, Time Series Forecasting.