FareCompare.com: My New Favorite Airfare Deal Site

Until now, there hasn’t been a web site that comes anywhere close to what most international travelers really want. Farecompare.com leaps way over everything out there though and provides both the overview and the details that enable you to make solid decisions. First of all, you can just enter your own city and get an incredibly cool view of flight prices to anywhere in the world. Here’s a piece of it:

Then you can drill down and check individual routes not just for one specific date, but what prices are like across weeks and months, from a slew of different airlines. And see the historical trends, so you know if it’s lower than usual. Then, if that’s not enough, you also see a little paper airplane telling you if there’s a deal running that will award you extra frequent flyer mileage.

You can pick specific routes you want to track by a bunch of different methods, you can see if leaving mid-week will save you money, you can tell at a glance how many stops there are on a route. There’s even a “Y-up” tab that lets you see what it would cost you to book a coach-listed fare that will put you in business/first class. (I can go first class to Memphis for $709, which is no bargain, but $523 to Houston makes a lot of sense if I’m a business traveler.) There’s an unbelievable wealth of info on here. There are so many other features that it’s going to take me weeks to figure out what else I can do with it, but that learning curve isn’t necessary to get a whole lot out of this on the first visit.

It’s not perfect, of course. For one thing, some airlines don’t release their info, so you won’t see Southwest Airlines flights, for instance. (Same problem with Kayak, Mobissimo, Sidestep, etc.) The other big downside of this site is that it’s only available for departures from the U.S. and Canada. For now, you’ll still have to use country-specific sites or a travel agent to figure all this out in the rest of the world.