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1 year on, Hipmunk (YC S10) hits 1 million flight + hotel searches a month

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Re: 1 year on, Hipmunk (YC S10) hits 1 million flight + hotel searches a month

#41

Post by hugh3 »

spez wrote: post #4
MatthewB wrote: post #2

I have used hipmunk a handful of times and it is dead simple to use. I do have a few problems with it: 1. There have been a few times that I have found a flight only to click through to another online flight aggregator (orbitz etc) to find they don't have the rates specified on hipmunk. Very frustrating. 2. I hate, hate, hate dealing with other aggregators (again..orbitz etc). I don't know if they do this already or…

#1 We do our best to mitigate this. Unfortunately, it's also the nature of the business. Availability is constantly changing. What's really mindblowing is that Orbitz will often have flights in their own results that will error out. This isn't specific to Orbitz either, everyone has to deal with this. #2 This is a big priority for us. We already have many direct deals, and more are on the way.

#1 We do our best to mitigate this. Unfortunately, it's also the nature of the business. Availability is constantly changing.

It's not just changing inventory though, I've had the same experience repeatedly over multiple days. hipmunk quoted me an itinerary, sent me through to (I think) US Airways to purchase it, and US Airways said it was no longer available and here's the same thing for $200 more. Gave up, tried again a few days later, hipmunk is still quoting the same fare.

Only happened for that one fare that one time, though. And I do love hipmunk and use it regularly. (Far more for speculating about places I'm thinking of going than for actually making bookings, I'm afraid).

Re: 1 year on, Hipmunk (YC S10) hits 1 million flight + hotel searches a month

#42

Post by hugh3 »

steve-howard wrote: post #24
sterwill wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my case I always start with Hipmunk, find a schedule I like, then I check southwest.com and end up buying a similar flight at about 75% of the other airline price.

Truth. I use Southwest unless I have no other choice (the only times have been when I specifically needed a red-eye and when I took a Thanksgiving flight at the last minute). Aside from the price, it's also just less irritating: not having TVs showing ads on the back of every seat is a big plus, and I don't have to plan around not bringing checked luggage.

I used to use Southwest a lot until I started discovering the joys of having status on an old-school carrier. If you fly less than 25,000 miles a year then Southwest is great, but if you fly more (and especially if you get up to 50 or 100K miles) then the perks of United (or similar) become irresistible.

Re: 1 year on, Hipmunk (YC S10) hits 1 million flight + hotel searches a month

#43

Post by hugh3 »

I love hipmunk for flights, but I'm less in love with the UI for hotels. I find it more confusing, and less easy to see what's good value. So if that's where they're really making their money then maybe they need to adapt it a bit.

I can see how in some cases it'd be great. If I'm looking for a hotel convenient to, say, the Denver Convention Center, then I can zoom in on that area and pick my favourite out of the small number of hotels within walking distance.

But if my goal is "I want a room somewhere in San Francisco, I don't especially care where as long as it's reasonably convenient, but it has to be reasonably good value but not too cheap" then I just get overwhelmed by having too many options and no obvious way to narrow them down (except by geography, which in this case I don't care too much about). And while I can easily understand "agony" as a function of price and duration, precisely what "ecstasy" should mean is beyond me.

Oh, and it seems to only tell me the average yelp rating, rather than the actual star class of the hotel, so it's really hard for me to decide whether $169 for the "Hotel Abri", with four yelp stars, is better or worse value than $106 a night for the "Hayes Valley Inn", also with four yelp stars. And then the Four Seasons, for $501 a night, gets 4.3 stars, but does that mean it's only slightly better than the Hayes Valley Inn? Probably not. Yelp stars generally aren't that useful except for identifying really awful places, since everywhere seems to rate somewhere between 3.5 and 4.5.

What I'd really like to see is information on how the price being asked for this hotel right now compares to the average price at which it's usually sold.

Re: 1 year on, Hipmunk (YC S10) hits 1 million flight + hotel searches a month

#44

Post by spez »

jhdavids8 wrote: post #31
spez wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price increases? We should have the same fares as everyone else online.

Spez, it took me no time at all to find a flight cheaper on Kayak than on Hipmunk. From Chicago to Honolulu (roundtrip) on 8/26 - 8/28, Kayak's cheapest rate is $936 total while Hipmunk's is $1063 total. This was my second search comparison between Kayak and Hipmunk. Not to be an ass, but this wasn't difficult at all, so you might want to incorporate some stricter testing before just saying that you "should have the…

I've seen this ORD -> HNL flight come up a couple times on this thread. So far, the prices that are better than ours seem to be flights with two connections, in a sea of results that only require one. I don't recall that exact algorithm off the top of my head, but that's the heart of the issue. This particular route seems to be a bit of an edge-case.

Re: 1 year on, Hipmunk (YC S10) hits 1 million flight + hotel searches a month

#45

Post by goldfish »

saucerful wrote: post #30
spez wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have an example? We should have the same fares as pretty much everyone else. There are some holes, but none in the US to my knowledge.

ORD to HNL 12/28 to 1/5. Hipmunk: $1092. Kayak: $917. (Both reservations have one layover in each direction and include tax. Kayak sends me to United.com directly while Hipmunk takes me to Orbitz.)

Possibly due to a fare update happening around the time you did the search. When I do that search on Hipmunk I see a lowest fare of $899 (http://www.hipmunk.com/#!ORD_HNL,Dec28_Jan05@0,0) for a one-stop flight in each direction. Kayak's price is the same for the same itinerary.

Admittedly Kayak has one flight for $870 and a few for $896, but they involved two stops.

Re: 1 year on, Hipmunk (YC S10) hits 1 million flight + hotel searches a month

#46

Post by purplefruit »

spez wrote: post #25
purplefruit wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah re #1 - I was under the impression that you were actually using Orbitz inventory for hotels (flights are through GDS I assume - but barely make money anyway). re #2 - yah totally subjective and I have no data besides anecdotes re #3 - again I have no data to support this. Just generally incredibly suspect of any growth that comes from SEM (though there's clearly cases where it's worked). Good to hear there's some…

For hotels, we do get Orbitz inventory, but we also have a number of direct relationships. As you know, hotels are much happier to do business with people like us because they're not perpetually going out of business. We've experimented with SEM, but it's not really cost effective for us. Everyone else in the business runs their own ads, giving them an ad-arbitrage business model we simply don't have. The upside to o…

Makes sense. I wasn't trying to dog on hipmunk too much. Like I said, I actually really like it. My biggest thing with the UI was whether or not non-analytically-minded people appreciate the nuances you guys are working on. Anyways, happy to chat more if you're interested. I can also fuck off :P

Re: 1 year on, Hipmunk (YC S10) hits 1 million flight + hotel searches a month

#48

Post by Hisoka »

1 million searches is OK but Compete shows them at 200K visitors/month: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/hipmunk.com/ and surprisingly, it shows they had MORE visits a year ago than they do around this time... so where's the growth? it seems stagnant...

Re: 1 year on, Hipmunk (YC S10) hits 1 million flight + hotel searches a month

#49

Post by reader2000 »

It's important to keep note of the fact that Hipmunk is not innovative about their UI/UX for the search results, but rather has done a great job at creating buzz and good marketing. ITA Software's free flight search tool ( http://matrix.itasoftware.com/ ) has had very similar looking search results of flight data for several years. Albeit their search form is more complex, but I like the complexity as it gives me more flexibility. I was rather surprised to see that Hipmunk copied ITA's search results almost completely without giving any credit.

ITA Software never wanted to compete with its customers, which means that you can't buy a ticket from them. I simply went directly to the airline websites to purchase the ticket.

I wish Hipmunk luck as they have a great job at marketing.

Re: 1 year on, Hipmunk (YC S10) hits 1 million flight + hotel searches a month

#50

Post by redthrowaway »

ezl wrote: post #37

I'd like to hear about how they've attracted the volume. I never see ads for them and 1mm searches/mo seems bigger than the set of "techcrunch + hacker news readers".

>1mm searches/mo seems bigger than the set of "techcrunch + hacker news readers"

It's the old reddit crew, so that's a big chunk of loyal users right there.

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