Casting Net for Better Airfare... (Wired online) I find the article by Dave Demerjian quite promissing for the travel industry: Flyspy and Farecast are two services predicting flight fares:

"Flyspy asks passengers for their departure and arrival cities, and then presents 30 days' worth of fare information in a stock-market style graph." "Farecast not only displays the lowest current fares, but uses predictive technology to determine what direction those fares will move in over the next seven days." I particularly like the fact that "The man behind Farecast is Oren Etzioni, a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. He developed a program originally called Hamlet ("To buy or not buy, that is the question," he says) that uses algorithms to identify patterns in airfare data."