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Hipmunk Says Goodbye

hipmunk.com

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Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#151

Post by toyg »

SergeAx wrote: post #140

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...

The big thing at the beginning was the ability to sort by “agony”, i.e. a combination of travel time, number and length of layovers, and carrier quality.

To this day I still find it the best search interface if price is not your only concern. It’s compact and easy to tweak.

Unfortunately, the way they handled payments was too US-centric, which meant I often ended up looking up a flight with them and then actually booking it somewhere else (because you don’t want to book an Euro trip with some unknown US operator who may or may not be accountable if anything goes wrong). Also some of the cheapest airlines were typically not included.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#152

Post by mbesto »

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…

> flights are just not that profitable.

Trivago, Kayak, etc would say otherwise. Yes margins are slim, but this is a classic case of why no UI/UX will ever trump mass distribution. OTAs are basically the walmart of the digital world.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#153

Post by jessriedel »

novok wrote: post #143
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 like skiplagged's price graph, which I didn't realize until now kayak has too. Skiplagged shows it in the search result, while kayak shows it only on the front page. I'll miss hipmunk's time chart when trying to plan flights.

Yea, I do wish Kayak had this, on the search page (although they do have a color-coded grid illustrating how prices change if you adjusted your dates +-3 days).

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#154

Post by toyg »

narrator wrote: post #11

I guess if they were still independent they could just run the app on maintenance mode. Since hosting is so cheap, they couldn't just pay a small team to maintain it?

Api access to all those services is not cheap.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#155

Post by monksy »

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.

Meals and bags:

Some do, some don't based on the route.

United decided to start bringing back free small snacks.

Also they brought back free wine/beer and 2 free bags in economy. *

Well they did that on my ORD-IAH-SCL-VAL/EZE-IAH-ORD route. But they don't do it for the Euro routes. It's really difficult to determine what your final cost is, and that is intentional. If I book a flight on Emirites, it's pretty easy to know what I'm getting.. but when compariing it to another airline, who knows what's the better value.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#156

Post by omegaworks »

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…

>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) became almost impossible.

What did you expect? Obama was a policy wonk, preferring to craft intricate rulesets and mandates to coddle entrenched players rather than prosecute fraud directly or engage in structural reform. He tours the country now on the corporate talk circuit shouting down reasonable populist policy.

We have a choice to change that now, in the Democratic primary.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#157

Post by realtalk_sp »

linuxftw wrote: post #102
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…

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.

> The only way to prevent this is with patents.

There are other ways. Network effects. Economies of scale. Branding. Arguably regulatory capture.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#158

Post by therealdrag0 »

jessriedel wrote: post #141
DangerousPie wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Anything in particular you like about Google Flights over Kayak? Aesthetics, functionality, or efficiency?

I just opened Kayak for the first time in a LONG time. - I don't like the rows and rows of panels trying to get me to go to other pages or see their guides. - I want a search focused page. - I don't like how when I click search, it automatically opens up cheapoair. - I don't like how the results page starts with a modal asking me to setup a price alert.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#159

Post by toyg »

jf22 wrote: post #90
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.

Two-three years is actually the optimal time frame to kill an acquired company, in my view, at least for big conglomerates. You avoid excessive brain-drain at the start by declaring far and wide that it will be “business as usual”; this way any useful know-how handover can happen smoothly, and you get a chance to identify the best bits you will eventually salvage. After a couple of years, you’ve likely cannibalized what was worth, the golden-handcuffed talent has either left or was moved to more critical areas, and the rest is just a legacy shell.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#160

Post by Rebelgecko »

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…

Google flights lets you adjust your flight takeoff and arrival times as well as min/max layover length, although the way that info is displayed when you're looking for a flight isn't quite as good as Hipmunk
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