Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. Fixed within 12 minutes from notification in an online forum to production. I am impressed.
SSH'ed info the production server, pico index.php, saved file, done.
Pico? Not nano? Hah you're old :)
Hipmunk Says Goodbye
101–110 of 347 posts
Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye
#102This 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…
An often echoed sentiment around here is 'is your startup idea a product, or a feature?' If you startup is a feature, it's just going to be copied.
The only way to prevent this is with patents.
Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye
#103Off-topic: I have been a long-time Kayak user, but don't see many people mention it hear when discussing Hipmunk. Does anyone feel strongly that one of the competitors is better than Kayak? If so, could you elaborate?
I have occasionally used Google Flights, but it seemed to have fewer knobs and I could not find any features that made me want to stay. The only competitors I have consistently but rarely used is Skiplagged, since it performs a kind of search (of somewhat dubious morals) that can't be done with Kayak.
Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye
#104Is anyone else seeing the strange lack of spaces? Multiple words throughout the blog post show up concatenated for me, so it seems like a weird transmission bug, not one typo.
The HTML markup is very strange. There are a bunch of spans around various characters, words, and sequences of words, and sometimes there are non-breaking spaces in seemingly random spots. Chrome and iOS Safari both seem confused about how to render the text and how to handle "word" selection (i.e. double-clicking). My guess would be this is the output of some web-based rich text editor from the blog engine or CMS. O…
Someone probably copied and pasted from somewhere into a JS rich text editor that converted it into html.
Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye
#105I worked for Hipmunk for a little over two years before they were purchased and have some fond memories of my time there. There have been a lot of articles on HN lately suggesting that it is better to work for a large company over a startup. Based on my time there, I would strongly disagree. I came in as a junior engineer (feral would be an appropriate term) and during my time, touched basically every part of the web…
> I came in as a junior engineer (feral would be an appropriate term) How did this work? From what I've seen, early stage startups always want senior only.
Start-ups hire "juniors" but they don't advertise the position as junior, you can identify these roles by virtue of them paying way under "market-rate". The downside is most companies (it seems Hipmunk was an exception) have little to no training for these "juniors" and you have to have a strong stomach for BS as you have to make do entirely by yourself. YMMV.
I've been in a junior start-up role twice very early in my career. It worked out for me, but I wouldn't really advise it in an era of Google/MS hiring massive amounts of fresh grads with high comp.
Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye
#106This 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…
Can someone explain to me what Concur does? I'm guessing it handles a bunch of the travel stuff for bigcos with lots of travelling sales people?
Yep, corporate flight/travel booking for entire orgs. The Department of Defense uses it for its travel system, too.
Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 :(.
This is mostly just a marketing thing, balancing the lead returns for flights with the companies ability to rank/sell ads on Google/elsewhere.
I'm sure the margins are low but given the competition you need high volume to really win and it's a highly competitive and fragmented space.
The UI alone is only part of the business model.
Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye
#108Earlier 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…
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 availa…
That explains one of my pet peeves of all travel search sites that are primarily useful for air travel search defaulting to hotel search.
Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye
#109This 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…
Why is it that Hipmunk had the best travel search interface I've used while SAP Concur's is absolute rubbish? What did they gain from the acquisition other than stopping a minor competitor?
Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye
#110This 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…
Can someone explain to me what Concur does? I'm guessing it handles a bunch of the travel stuff for bigcos with lots of travelling sales people?
I used it for trip planning and expenses when I worked at a BigCo. It reminded me a lot of Amex travel.