Farecast was founded in 2003; Farecast's team of
data miners used airfare observations to build algorithms to predict future airfare price movements. Founded by
Oren Etzioni, Microsoft officially integrated it as part of its
Live Search group of tools in May 2008. On June 3, 2009, Microsoft officially rebranded "Live Search Farecast" as "Bing Travel" as part of its efforts to create a new search identity with
Bing. In 2009, there were allegations that Bing Travel had copied its layouts from
Kayak; Microsoft denied the allegations. In January 2014, the airfare prediction feature, which was previously the flagship feature of Farecast, was removed from Bing Travel. In May 2015, Microsoft rebranded "Bing Travel" to "MSN Travel" and, for some time, redirected the Bing Travel website to MSN Travel. In August 2015, however, Microsoft shut down its
MSN Travel app, and the MSN Travel flight search pages changed from being powered by
Kayak to competitor
Skyscanner. Microsoft later shut down the MSN Travel website entirely, but as of 2025,
Bing retains a Bing Travel search section on its website. ==References==