Today we’re talking about Fareness, a fairly new service which pretty much comes with the same concept. Fareness allows you to search for any destination and see a scrollable calendar of fares for 200 departure dates, along with a corresponding map of similar destinations, and suggested trip tiles across themes in the same time. Here are some more details regarding the functionality of the service from Scott Wainner, the founder and CEO at Fareness: “You’re also able to hone in on your desired trip month and trip length. On the backend, we’re not simply tied into an OTA — we built our own engine for maximum accuracy and bookability to keep track of millions of dynamic fares. And, we have a robust hotel search built in, which we will be transitioning into discounted package bookings within Fareness.” All the fares are shown as round trip, so you will have a clear overview of the total cost of your trip. Another specific feature of Fareness is that it helps those with no specific destination in mind. You have at your disposal such categories as beach, Europe, Hawaii, music, outdoors, museum and others, grouping destinations according to your interests.
So, for example, if you want to travel to some place that is know for its museums, Fareness will show the lowest-priced options within a range of dates at a number of various destinations. The website’s search engine can offer up to nearly 200 departure dates and 10 trip lengths with one search. I’ve tried the service, and what I’ve noticed is that it tends to come up with suggestions for those living in the US. When I selected beach, it was showing destinations that were quite faraway. Also, when selecting ‘Europe’, there weren’t too many options at disposal, so at least in my case, the service worked when I knew which destination to input. But this could be because the website has just started, so we should give it some more time. Furthermore, Fareness has no direct booking capabilities yet and another drawback is that flight time specific searches and non-stop flight searches are not available, meaning you have to book flights via CheapOair or Priceline. But Fareness said they will add all of these options in the future, which are must-have, if you ask me. Thus, for the time being Fareness is a pretty interesting concept which looks to become a popular tool for travelers who don’t know yet where they are going. But the service needs to add a couple of more features before it can really challenge the competition.
