Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hipmunk Says Goodbye

hipmunk.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 347 posts

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#81

Post by ape4 »

rconti wrote: post #68
ape4 wrote: post #58

As a Canadian, a feature I'd really like... request no stops in the USA. eg when flying to South America. (USA is a great country but doesn't get "in transit")

How many countries do? I take it for granted traveling through Europe, but made the 'mistake' of booking a USA->Peru trip through Mexico City rather than taking a lounger journey through Miami, and had to clear customs and fill out a landing card for Mexico. Then it ended up being the same when transiting through intermediate countries in South America. I have so damn many passport stamps from just one trip, where I'…

Perhaps its small countries that do it best. Eg Hong Kong, Singapore. Well, the website needs a database of "in transit" aware countries (or airports) and option to prefer them.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#82

Post by ryantuck »

phsource wrote: post #22

This is a long time coming: for more context, Hipmunk was acquired by Concur back in 2016 for $58MM [1] as the flights meta-search business was just getting tougher and tougher As someone who's dabbled in flights bookings (BookWithMatrix) and now am working on a travel startup (Wanderlog, https://wanderlog.com , a Google Docs/Trips for travel planning), flights are just not that profitable. In North America, you'd be…

Wow, wanderlog seems very cool! Way more intuitive than my custom google map / sheets that I've set up for a two week honeymoon around the corner. Will give it a whirl!

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#83

Post by cglong »

bitL wrote: post #24

This is sad - Hipmunk greatly facilitated my digital nomad lifestyle at some point as I could chain multiple flights in multiple months together to make "a travel around the world" schedule, i.e. 1 month intervals Boston->Miami->Zurich->Kyoto->Sydney->Auckland->Honolulu->Vancouver->San Francisco, all without any return flights and spaced as I liked. Is there any other service allowing the same?

Google Flights supports "multi-city" travel plans that does exactly this!

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#84

Post by seppin »

cbright wrote: post #56

"Any time a company gets acquired, there are always concerns about what it means for the company and product. Here are some things to know: 1. Hipmunk isn’t going anywhere" -Adam Goldstein, October 3, 2016

The problem is he had no authority to say that.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#85

Post by amenghra »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #77
phsource wrote: post #22

This is a long time coming: for more context, Hipmunk was acquired by Concur back in 2016 for $58MM [1] as the flights meta-search business was just getting tougher and tougher As someone who's dabbled in flights bookings (BookWithMatrix) and now am working on a travel startup (Wanderlog, https://wanderlog.com , a Google Docs/Trips for travel planning), flights are just not that profitable. In North America, you'd be…

What alternatives exist to Hipmunk's display of flights? I've never seen a site with a similar display of flights by time, including display of the layovers, and easy ways to drag the earliest and latest start times to eliminate flights that aren't an option. > ITA Matrix still has time bars, if you loved that UI ITA Matrix doesn't seem to do anything like Hipmunk's UI. > flights are just not that profitable. In Nort…

http://www.ai.mit.edu/courses/6.034f/psets/ps1/airtravel.pdf might help you understand why it's not a trivial problem

(I'm not saying 1-2% commission should or shouldn't cover the costs, just pointing out what goes into these engines).

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#86

Post by saurik »

amenghra wrote: post #85
JoshTriplett wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What alternatives exist to Hipmunk's display of flights? I've never seen a site with a similar display of flights by time, including display of the layovers, and easy ways to drag the earliest and latest start times to eliminate flights that aren't an option. > ITA Matrix still has time bars, if you loved that UI ITA Matrix doesn't seem to do anything like Hipmunk's UI. > flights are just not that profitable. In Nort…

http://www.ai.mit.edu/courses/6.034f/psets/ps1/airtravel.pdf might help you understand why it's not a trivial problem (I'm not saying 1-2% commission should or shouldn't cover the costs, just pointing out what goes into these engines).

And yet, there are a bunch of services that offer flight search (whether or not it is profitable), none of which (that I know of) with a UI (as this is just a UI issue) as good as Hipmunk :(.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#87

Post by neebz »

For me Hipmunk had the best calendar control. You could just type in your dates in pretty much any format and it was able to parse it. No need mess around with pop-ups and small buttons to switch months etc.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#88

Post by wolco »

johnhess wrote: post #51

This is a shame, and says more about the consolidation of the tech industry than Hipmunk's product. One of Hipmunk's founders spoke to a course that I was in about their experience as a founder and how they were running their business. A few weeks later, a well known founder of another travel search company visited the class and said outright that if Hipmunk did have any success, that they would copy those features a…

That strategy only works so far. Keep adding and things get bloated. Servicing a narrow use-case can cause them problems with coping.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#89

Post by splonk »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #77
phsource wrote: post #22

This is a long time coming: for more context, Hipmunk was acquired by Concur back in 2016 for $58MM [1] as the flights meta-search business was just getting tougher and tougher As someone who's dabbled in flights bookings (BookWithMatrix) and now am working on a travel startup (Wanderlog, https://wanderlog.com , a Google Docs/Trips for travel planning), flights are just not that profitable. In North America, you'd be…

What alternatives exist to Hipmunk's display of flights? I've never seen a site with a similar display of flights by time, including display of the layovers, and easy ways to drag the earliest and latest start times to eliminate flights that aren't an option. > ITA Matrix still has time bars, if you loved that UI ITA Matrix doesn't seem to do anything like Hipmunk's UI. > flights are just not that profitable. In Nort…

1-2% is more of an upper bound. The numbers I've seen have been more like 10's of cents per conversion. And for whatever reasons, flight availability providers are not in the business of providing high throughput for clients, so the cost of performing those searches is probably considerably higher than you think. When I joined the travel industry I was shocked at what people considered reasonable latencies for availability calls, as well as the costs people pay just to get that level of performance.

If you want to make money in travel search, there's a lot more money in commissions for hotel bookings than in air.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#90

Post by jf22 »

cbright wrote: post #56

"Any time a company gets acquired, there are always concerns about what it means for the company and product. Here are some things to know: 1. Hipmunk isn’t going anywhere" -Adam Goldstein, October 3, 2016

I don't think it is reasonable to expect a promise like this to be kept three years later.
Post reply on HN