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Hipmunk Says Goodbye

hipmunk.com

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Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#131

Post by lotsofpulp »

tempsy wrote: post #40
jba wrote: post #4

Bah, not a huge surprise given how brutal the travel tech industry is, but they remained my fav travel site - seemed to often find fares that were missing off google flights or other competitors. Loved the U/I too. RIP.

Define "brutal" Booking has made money off travel hand over fist this past decade. It's highly competitive, sure, but for a reason since hotels pay massive premiums to these websites to drive sales.

Hotels have less of a monopoly on travel than airlines. Plus most hotels are franchised, so the brands don’t have an incentive to lower commissions paid as they still get their royalties from gross revenue, and it all comes out of the hotel owner’s pockets.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#132

Post by scottrogowski »

celticninja wrote: post #126
atom-morgan wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You can want seniors all you like but if your budget can't handle it you get juniors. This is how you end up with something that works bit doesn't scale well. By the time you need to scale you should be able to afford seniors.

I think the part about the budget was accurate but it might have also just been difficult to attract top talent without the name recognition.

I have my opinions which I will not share for why Hipmunk stagnated but I will say, it had nothing to do with scaling or technical obstacles.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#133

Post by majormajor »

dmix wrote: post #124
seltzered_ wrote: post #57

There's a number of comments about how hipmunk declined or didn't have good prices. It reminded me of a recent Matthew Stoller piece ( https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-wave-of-terror-in-ame... ) : "Similarly, I spoke on a panel a few months ago in Congress on airlines, and Adam Goldstein, the former CEO of flight travel booking site Hipmunk, talked as well. I used to love Hipmunk, but it’s terrible now and I do…

> after the wave of consolidation among airlines during the Obama years, Ah the "too big to fail" years where everything consolidated and only got bigger including the big evil banks which took the brunt of the public's fury following the 2008 crisis (and occupy). It's funny how so much of the regulations put in place had the opposite effect and made running small firms (ie, with more liability than the big ones) bec…

I don't understand you using consolidation and abuse of power as a reason to dislike regulation. There are plenty of non-regulatory incentives for consolidation. Why not simply regulate consolidation? Target large holding companies and megacorps with aggressive taxation policies on revenue or headcount or market cap or similar? And then enforce the regulation with teeth?

There are always going to be creative people coming up with new ways to be bad actors, so regulation has to be an evolving constant. But responding with an aversion to regulation is just giving the game to the bad actors.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#134

Post by DangerousPie »

jessriedel wrote: post #103

Off-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 Skipla…

I used to use Kayak and Skyscanner but started using Google Flights more recently because it has a much nicer interface.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#135

Post by why-oh-why »

yezr wrote: post #127
why-oh-why wrote: post #119

Something that’s hard for me to find is a website that gets me from point A to point B without caring about stop count and duration. Is the flight cheap and stops 23 hours in Hong Kong and 20 hours in Kuala Lumpur? I’ll take it. Also Kiwi and Google Flights let you make wide searches but their efficiency drops so low they’re basically useless in my experience. You’re better off searching day by day. Hipmunk never ret…

https://www.skiplagged.com is exactly what you are looking for! dirt cheap flights sometimes with like 12 hour layovers. If you have the time (but not necessarily the money) it is just the ticket

Sadly it doesn’t seem to work in this part of the world. I keep trying it but it never shows any SkipLagged flights, just the regular ones

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#136

Post by ufmace »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #117
ufmace wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I almost think I want a new kind of search these days, for which flights are actually cheapest, not just on ticket face price. I want to know if I have to pay $30 each way to check a bag, or try to pack something that will fit in overhead, not trigger a TSA panic, and then struggle past everyone else's delays in security and boarding because they wanted to save $30 and are trying to carry on a bag they can barely lif…

You can go ahead and answer yes to all of those for any US airline and probably many non US airline, except maybe Singapore and the other top tier ones. But I assume that won’t be for long either.

It's sadly true for most. I have noticed that Southwest is a notable outlier in all this - they don't do any of that stuff. They also don't seem to register their flights on most of the search sites. It's like they know that those customers choose based on raw price alone, no room to sell any other differences. I make it a point to search their company site first before trying any other flight search.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#137

Post by why-oh-why »

gkoberger wrote: post #128
why-oh-why wrote: post #119

Something that’s hard for me to find is a website that gets me from point A to point B without caring about stop count and duration. Is the flight cheap and stops 23 hours in Hong Kong and 20 hours in Kuala Lumpur? I’ll take it. Also Kiwi and Google Flights let you make wide searches but their efficiency drops so low they’re basically useless in my experience. You’re better off searching day by day. Hipmunk never ret…

You might like https://flightfox.com/ . Your use case is the opposite of theirs, but it could help!

I knew it but never used it. This seems to be worth a try:

> We guarantee to beat your quote by more than our fee otherwise our service is entirely FREE.

Thank you!

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#138

Post by ufmace »

dmix wrote: post #100
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…

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?

We used it once at one of my previous employers. It was used for creating and approving expense reports for travel, with various elaborate options for approval flow and documentation.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#139

Post by why-oh-why »

jgalt212 wrote: post #129
why-oh-why wrote: post #119

Something that’s hard for me to find is a website that gets me from point A to point B without caring about stop count and duration. Is the flight cheap and stops 23 hours in Hong Kong and 20 hours in Kuala Lumpur? I’ll take it. Also Kiwi and Google Flights let you make wide searches but their efficiency drops so low they’re basically useless in my experience. You’re better off searching day by day. Hipmunk never ret…

> Something that’s hard for me to find is a website that gets me from point A to point B without caring about stop count and duration. Is the flight cheap and stops 23 hours in Hong Kong and 20 hours in Kuala Lumpur? I’ll take it. This used to Orbitz's specialty--save $15 with a 19 hour lay over. And they used to promote this by saying they had better search results. But, hey, they got rich off of Google, so probably…

I occasionally end up on Orbitz and like many other big names they don’t show low cost airlines, which means some flights are 3-5x more expensive to begin with. I pity the customers who don’t know better

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#140

Post by SergeAx »

I am not a travel newbie, but I believe it's the first time I heard about Hipmunk. What was so innovative about them? It looks like yet another travel aggregator among at least half dozen of it's kind: Kiwi, SkyScanner, Kayak, Expedia, Priceline, Orbitz...
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