Posted by Flying home to your loved ones this Holiday season? You’re probably one of the lucky ones who could get a decent ticket. You’ve packed your bags, wrapped your presents, and set your alarm. Since you’re full of Holiday Spirit, you even resist the urge to chuckle at the poor people that still have to fly at impossible times.
Of course, booking the ticket is only part of the travel equation. Now it is up to the airline to stick to the schedule and bring you home on time. As crazy as this sounds, the airlines don’t have a perfect track record, especially on the Holidays. Being Holiday travelers ourselves, we were concerned with this very problem. So, in our gallery we’ve created a model that will help you predict the delay you can expect on your US Domestic flight.
The model is based on almost 2.5 million flights and will predict the arrival delay you can expect. All you need is the date you are flying, your destination and origin and your carrier. Suppose you managed to book Delta to fly from Portland to Boston on Sunday, Dec 23rd. An arrival delay is predicted of 6 minutes with an error of 22 minutes. So you may want to take up to half an hour of delay into account in planning for your festivities in Boston. Check this post if you are not familiar with ‘error’ and ‘confidence’.
Which flights are destined to get you into real trouble? You can find out yourself if you interact with this predictive model.
If you do get stuck at an airport and there’s a decent wifi, you can always check out the prediction and see if the Model was right -“told you so”- or if it missed the mark by miles. Don’t hesitate to let us know. Here’s a little holiday music to keep the spirits up. Safe travels!
The Official Blog of BigML.com 