Farecast launched it’s public beta today. Farecast is an airline fare prediction service that allows consumers to predict whether it is better to buy airline tickets now or wait for a possibly cheaper price within the next 7 days. Farecast accomplishes this prediction through analysis of 60 billion records of past airfare prices.

This should prove to be a remarkably useful service and I see no reason as to why it wouldn’t be successful. Farecast could easily be acquired by one of the big names in travel (Orbitz, Travelocity, etc) or stay the course and start charging a nominal fee when tickets are sold (this is how the aforementioned travel leaders make their money).

Farecast does seem to be experiencing some growing pains though. First, I could only select between Boston, MA or Seattle, WA for my originating flight location. I’m not sure if this is a limitation of the beta right now or if the AJAXy goodness was faulting out on the page load. Various sections of the website are returning “Service Unavailable” errors, leading me to believe the Farecast team didn’t predict how much traffic their site was going to get once this beta launched.

Farecast took the leap and released their beta before their major competitor, Flyspy – they just need to pony up the horses and get their website running properly.