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Joining in the fray of predictive holiday and flight search is Hotwire, following on the heels of Farecast and Fare Compare. A Fare Prediction shows if the lowest fare is rising or dropping over the next seven days for the specific dates and cities searched (according to the Farecast website). So, in laymans terms they basically ‘predict’ when its cheapest to go.

Hotwire’s offering is called Trip Starter and my seaching for a trip to Las Vegas from my local airport at Fort Myers returned a graph showing airfare and hotel price fluctuations by the month.

Best time to fly, according to Trip Starter is January, February and September. Best time to stay, July, August and December. They advise to avoid the crowds, go during the first three weeks in December or on weekdays in July.

One advantage Trip Starter has over its rivals is that by plugging in the results to Hotwire affiliate Trip Advisor they are able to offer local guides, events and maps, something Farecast and Fare Compare dont offer right now.

I rambled on here about finding flights and deals online in the ‘traditional’ manner using meta-searchers so you dont have to visit each individual travel site etc, but there is an even more time efficient way by using RSS. I’m assuming that readers have some entry level knowledge of RSS, if not, read this to get some background on the format that’ll help save you bundles of time.

I use the Sage RSS reader in my Firefox browser. Its a great lightweight way of reading RSS feeds without having to log-in to an online reader or fire up a desktop stand alone ( I use Feed Demon for more heavy duty feed trawling). Once you’ve installed Sage in Firefox you can open it in a browser sidebar to view your feeds.

The “big three” online travel agents, Travelocity, Expedia and Orbitz all now offer various RSS feeds.

You can customize the feeds to your own search preferences in Expedia. They offer hotel and flight combo’s or just individual flights or hotel feeds. The Florida departure cities covered so far are Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Tampa and Orlando with Fort Myers and Disney and West Palm Beach added to that list as destinations (as well as other destinations in the USA and Europe). You build your travel preferences, agree to the T&C’s and a feed is built. Unfortunately for me there was no departure point from my nearest airport in Fort Myers, though I could use it in the oposite direction. Read the rest of this entry »