alarm:clock

Search - Friday, April 18, 2008

MSFT Buys Travel Site Farecast

Microsoft is buying fellow Seattle business Farecast for $75M plus significant earnouts. This seems like small but smart deal by Microsoft to continue to add to its vertical market buildouts.

Farecast launched in May 2006, and went through a year of beta testing before emerging from beta. Farecast may still be the only website to offer predictions on when is the best time to purchase airline tickets. In 2007 Farecast launched a beta version of its hotel search engine.

Farecast hired an independent audit firm to verify it prediction accuracy at 74.5%. Farecast also offers a Fare Guard service, which allows customers to lock-in a specific price for a flight with protection from future price increases for the following seven days.

The company was Founded in 2003 by Oren Etzioni, who was founder of MetaCrawler and a professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington.

Farecast has raised just over $20 million in VC funding, from firms like Madrona Venture Group, Greylock Partners, Pinnacle Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and WRF Group.

Farecast is led by CEO Hugh Crean who at one time was Priceline's: VP, Product/Corporate Development.

View - site