( CNN ) -- It 's happened to the best of us ; you 've seen an airfare on a travel site and decided to jump on it , only to watch the price plummet weeks later . Or worse , you 've sat on it , only to see it leap beyond the reaches of your budget . Such a grating scenario may be a thing of the past , as price predictors are becoming a common feature on booking websites . TheSuitest , a relatively new hotel booking website that not only lists available rooms , but grades the price on an A to F scale , is the latest venture to adopt the software . Last month , it became the first hotel booking site to add price forecasting , adding a function called `` hotel time machine '' . The tool analyzes over 10,000 different pricing models to predict whether the price will rise or fall , even providing a percent likelihood . Given the complexity of the algorithm , it should probably come as no surprise that TheSuitest is the brainchild of a former Goldman Sach 's analyst . `` I come from an investment finance background , and my job was all about processing large volumes of info and distilling it into something you could make a split-second , actionable decision on , '' says Jeremy Murphy , TheSuitest 's CEO and founder . `` We took that mentality and applied it to the website . '' Murphy notes that it 's only recently a site like his would be able to operate . `` Even a few years ago , it was n't really practical for a site to collect and process the volume of data that are necessary to do the types of things that we 're doing . We 're dealing with billions of past prices and have to literally produce a trillion-trillion forecasts , '' he says . Interactive : Which airlines have wi-fi ? TheSuitest is one of several sites to jump on the trend . In January , Kayak added a price forecast option to its website , letting guests use it to predict whether an airfare will stay put or take a leap . `` At Kayak , every employee randomly gets assigned user feedback . Enough of us saw users were asking for us to do this that we decided to allow our engineers to experiment , '' explains Giorgos Zacharia , Kayak 's chief product officer . Kayak 's approach to number-crunching is slightly different , in that the company bases its data on the billion-plus search queries performed by users . `` That 's the benefit of our approach : the user does the crowdsourcing for us , '' explains Zacharia . The advantage of Kayak 's model is it relies on an enormous amount of data to make predictions . The downfall is that niche destinations ( those that are n't searched as often ) are often overlooked . `` They 're not as accurate , because we do n't have enough data on those regions , yet , '' admits Zachaia . Looking to the future . Price forecasters are n't entirely new . Farecast.com brought the feature to the market back in 2005 . The company was since bought by Microsoft and rebranded Bing Travel . The forecaster is still very much a part of Bing 's model and , unlike at Kayak , it extends to both hotel rooms and airfares , though strictly in the U.S. market . One might imagine that price predictors would make hotels and airlines somewhat nervous . After all , if a deal is rated `` bad '' , or an airfare listed as likely to drop , are n't hotels and airlines less likely to sell at a premium price ? Murphy says he 's found the opposite is true . `` We expected a hostile response from hotels , just because we were shedding light on their pricing policies . We 've actually been approached by a lot of big name chains because they see an opportunity to sell people a nicer room . '' Read more : Place your bids for business class . In other words , the more expensive rooms that do n't necessarily sell as well could in fact be a better deal . Though somewhat in its infancy , forecasting tools are going to become the norm , not just in the travel industry , but across a range or websites , according to travel industry analyst Brian London . `` As customers start feeling comfortable using it , more sites will copy the technology , '' he explains . `` Imagine the implications for the restaurant industry . If they know they 'll be crowded on a Friday night , for instance , they can utilize this tool to incentivize people to eat dinner earlier . ''
January , TheSuitest became the first hotel booking site to launch a price forecaster . The site is the brainchild of a Goldman Sachs analyst , and crunches billion-plus of bits of data . Kayak and Goldman Sachs offer a similar feature for airfares , predicting if a price will rise or fall . Kayak taps into the millions searches made on its site for its data .