A flight search engine that I would be interested in:
The craziest routing.
Instead flying for USD 700 A->Destination or A->B>Destination Fly A->C>D>E>F>G>Destination
Hipmunk (YC S10) Acquired by Concur
91–100 of 126 posts
Re: Hipmunk (YC S10) Acquired by Concur
#92The killer feature of Hipmunk for some of us is the ability to understand some of the ITA Matrix codes and so it's one of the platforms to book an interesting itinerary put together on the Matrix. (If you are interested in this, there is an up-and-coming service which tries to do same called bookwithmatrix and there's a userscript maintained on flyertalk adding booking links to the ITA Matrix itself.)
Re: Hipmunk (YC S10) Acquired by Concur
#93Hipmunk has been an excellent flight search tool, the best I have found as of a few years ago. Shockingly better than most of the rest of them back when it started, in terms of being able to understand and choose among numerous choices. Unfortunately, that was then and this is now. Several of the airlines have dropped out of participating in flight comparison sites, and those that do apparently pay staggeringly littl…
Google flights is pretty good, I think.
https://www.google.com/flights/
Skyscanner sometimes
Re: Hipmunk (YC S10) Acquired by Concur
#94Hipmunk has been an excellent flight search tool, the best I have found as of a few years ago. Shockingly better than most of the rest of them back when it started, in terms of being able to understand and choose among numerous choices. Unfortunately, that was then and this is now. Several of the airlines have dropped out of participating in flight comparison sites, and those that do apparently pay staggeringly littl…
What is the best flight search these days?
momondo.com is the best I found. Not sure how it works for US flights though, since I mostly fly in Europe.
Re: Hipmunk (YC S10) Acquired by Concur
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who protects the consumer when weather or FAA traffic management makes you miss your connecting flight?
Glad you asked. We do: https://www.kiwi.com/us/content/guarantee Apparently the rewrite of this dry wall of text is not live yet, so let me paraphrase: You contact us and we book you the flight that gets you to your destination the earliest (if needed we pay for a taxi or bus or anything to get you to another airport if needed.)
> In the case that we are unable to find a reasonable alternative flight(s) or other means of transportation, due to a disproportionate price difference between the potential alternative transportation and the original price for the unused flights, we may agree with you on our proportional contribution to the costs associated with a mutually agreed upon alternative transportation.
This doesn't sound like a 100% guarantee. Most of the times on the day tickets will be a lot more expensive than advance purchases.
Re: Hipmunk (YC S10) Acquired by Concur
#96Concur's core product is shockingly awful. My company recently switched to it, and I don't know anyone who actually uses it. Most of us have figured out we get lower prices and less hassle by just ordering directly from the airlines / hotels and booking them to or corporate credit cards. If you're in a hurry, we can just call AmEx travel and pay $30 for them to book the trip for us using their travel agent terminals…
I use Concur because my crappy corporate employer purchased it. My strong suspicion is anyone who matters makes his or her assistant use concur rather than doing it him/herself. The product is absolutely awful. Like just stunningly bad.
Most of their assistants just use AmEx travel (or some other travel agency software) -- which has a much higher per-seat license and actually ties in to the back-end reservation systems so you can see all flights, etc. As far as I can tell, Concur sources its data through site scraping in order to achieve the lower per-seat licensing costs (since flight data feeds are very expensive).
Re: Hipmunk (YC S10) Acquired by Concur
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the incentive for airlines who don't offer bargain-basement flights to participate?
Many customers will still choose airlines they like to fly. For instance, I filter Spirit Airlines flights, even if they are offering the lowest fare.
And also flight routes - I'd rather fly with a stopover in Singapore than a stopover in Dubai.
Re: Hipmunk (YC S10) Acquired by Concur
#98Re: Hipmunk (YC S10) Acquired by Concur
#99Re: Hipmunk (YC S10) Acquired by Concur
#100Anyone have insight into the sale price? Hipmunk raised $55M over 7 rounds [1] and had 51 employees [2]. [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/hipmunk#/entity [2] https://www.hipmunk.com/about
Generally when numbers aren't released, it's an acquihire. Which means it probably went for less than the amount they raised.
It became obvious that Hipmunk was never going to be a 100x growth company, and the industry is not headed in a positive direction for small companies (access to accurate data is increasingly a roadblock), so I'm guessing the investors were happy to get out before the value of the company was zero.
I'm sure the employees were given optional retention packages, and the executives likely compensated very well, but I wouldn't expect anyone got rich here.