Travel

#Travel websites adopt price forecasting.

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Last month, TheSuitest became the first hotel booking site to launch a price forecaster The site is the brainchild of a Goldman Sachs analyst, and crunches millions of bits of data Kayak and Bing Travel offer a similar feature for airfares, predicting if a price will rise or fall Kayak taps into the billion-plus searches made on its site for its data

It's happened to the best of us; you've seen an airfare on a travel site and decided to jump on it, only to watch the price plummet weeks later. Or worse, you've sat on it, only to see it leap beyond the reaches of your budget. Such a grating scenario may be a thing of the past, as price predictors are becoming a common feature on booking websites.

TheSuitest. a relatively new hotel booking website that not only lists available rooms, but grades the price on an A to F scale, is the latest venture to adopt the software. Last month, it became the first hotel booking site to add price forecasting, adding a function called "hotel time machine".

The tool analyzes over 10,000 different pricing models to predict whether the price will rise or fall, even providing a percent likelihood. Given the complexity of the algorithm, it should probably come as no surprise that TheSuitest is the brainchild of a former Goldman Sach's analyst.

"I come from an investment finance background, and my job was all about processing large volumes of info and distilling it into something you could make a split-second, actionable decision on," says Jeremy Murphy, TheSuitest's CEO and founder.

"We took that mentality and applied it to the website."

Murphy notes that it's only recently a site like his would be able to operate.