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Two incremental improvements to the world of travel searches. Two of my favorite sites have added features:

FareCompare.com has gone live with their historical price data on fares between cities. Want to see how current fares stack up? Do a search for city pairs, and you’ll see the price trends for the last 12 months. If the slope is heading up, don’t be surprised, given the price of oil. But if a current fare deviates below the average (black) line, it’s probably a good fare, and you may want to buy. See here for a tutorial.

Fare metasearch/aggregator Kayak.com added flexible date searching to their arsenal of tools. Not a shocker for users of Travelocity, Orbitz, etc., but this is the first use of flexible searching on a site that searches multiple travel sellers’ inventories. Another reason Kayak is my favorite among the aggregators, previously reviewed here. Minor nuisance: registration is required in order to use the flexible-date search feature. (WHY???)