Services Airfare Comparison Number of employees Unknown Headquarters Dallas Type of business Private | Owner XXI Technologies CEO Rick Seaney (Jan 2005–) Founded 2004 | |
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Industry Travel technology
Travel services Key people Rick Seaney, CEO
Graeme Wallace, CTO Products Travel and airfare information | ||
FareCompare L.P. is a privately owned company which provides airline tickets, airfare, air travel planning tools, and travel advice services. The company's primary product is FareCompare.com, an airfare comparison shopping site. It also offers online group travel booking services. The company was founded in 2004 and is headquartered in Dallas, Texas.
Contents
FareCompare.com is a meta-search engine which pulls data from a number of sources including major airline companies, IATA data, and other sources in order to provide real-time search for air flights based primarily upon low pricing.
History
FareCompare developed out of XXI Technologies, a business which has performed technical consulting and data mining for the oil industry and other companies. While working on a project for Hotels.com, the company became introduced to central databases of airfares which the airlines had cooperatively developed (see Orbitz). The large database containing up to 160 million new ticket prices daily had previously been challenging for searching in real-time, but XXI Technologies came up with new techniques for rapidly processing the volume of data in order to make it searchable.
After Expedia purchased Hotels.com, the work by XXI Technologies was discarded. However, the developers considered the fast processing to be a differentiating feature which might fill a significant market need, so they began operating under a new company name, FareCompare L.P. XXI Technologies became the holding company for the concern and FareCompare.com launched in March 2006. The two principal founders are Rick Seaney, Chief Executive Officer, and Graeme Wallace, Chief Technical Officer.
Technology and products
FareCompare has been known for leveraging new versions of Java in order to exploit the latest advances in performance improvements. FareCompare.com offers users airfare price comparison, as well as hotel and package pricing. Other consumer products include Fare Alerts and weekly Fare Deals.
Research
FareCompare applies data mining techniques to airfare information in order to report upon best dates for cheapest tickets. Statistical data from the company's historical price index is also used by financial analysts to assess and predict airline industry stock prices.
Controversy
Directly after launch, FareCompare frequently attracted disfavor from major airlines for communicating the pricing details their analyses uncovered in airfares, such as the dates consumers should book travel in order to avoid higher pricing, along with other high price avoidance tactics. The company data has been used in news reports and programs about travel tips.