FareCompare L.P. is a privately-owned company which provides plane 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

Dallas, Texas

Dallas is the third-largest city in Texas and the ninth-largest in the United States. The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is the largest metropolitan area in the South and fourth-largest metropolitan area in the United States...

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FareCompare.com is a meta-search engine which pulls data from a number of sources including major airline companies, IATA

International Air Transport Association

The International Air Transport Association is an international industry trade group of airlines headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where the International Civil Aviation Organization is also headquartered. The executive offices are at the Geneva Airport in SwitzerlandIATA's mission is to...

 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

Hotels.com

Hotels.com is an operating company of Expedia, Inc. that provides reservation services for hotel rooms and other places to stay.The company was founded in Dallas, TX in 1991 as Hotel Reservations Network by Dave Litman and Bob Diener as a toll-free telephone service, offering consumers a one-stop...

, the company became introduced to central databases of airfares which the airlines had cooperatively developed (see Orbitz

Orbitz

Orbitz Worldwide, Inc. is an Internet travel company headquartered in the Citigroup Center in Near West Side, Chicago, Illinois. Through its primary web site Orbitz.com, Orbitz Worldwide enables travelers to research, plan and book a broad range of travel products, facilitating 1.5 million flight...

. 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

Expedia

Expedia is an Internet-based travel website based in the US with localised sites for 21 countries...

 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 of 2006. The two principal founders are Rick Seaney, Chief Executive Officer, and Graeme Wallace, Chief Technical Officer.

Technology

FareCompare has been known for leveraging new versions of Java in order to exploit the latest advances in performance improvements.

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.

Controversies

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.