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

171–180 of 347 posts

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#171

Post by mike_d »

mbesto wrote: post #152
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.

> Trivago, Kayak, etc would say otherwise.

Trivago is in the hotel business, which has better margins. Some sites like Expedia will actually take a loss on a flight if you book it with a hotel or rental car, which they make a profit on.

Kayak (and the rest of the Priceline/Booking.com group) takes a much more advertising driven model. You'll notice the site has lots of pushes to sign you up for their various mailing lists that yield long term reoccurring revenue on airline credit cards and travel packages.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#172

Post by devcpp »

majormajor wrote: post #133
dmix wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

Oh hell no. More lawyers to find more loopholes. How about addressing the root cause: the lack of competition? The way to do this is lower the barrier to entry, which is made of 100% over-regulation.

You can involve all the antitrust you want, as long as you don't lower the barrier to entry you're just lying to yourself and adding more useless middlemen.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#173

Post by stjohnswarts »

majormajor wrote: post #133
dmix wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

I have always used this argument and agree with it. When it becomes obvious that a corporation is large and too powerful bust it up. Don't regulate the industry so much that you price control things (essentially) and add so many regulations that an army of lawyers is necessary to navigate. Industries almost always tend toward monopolies/oligopolies as people tend to try and concentrate power. Our Constitution (as long as we respect it) demands a split of power but the lassez-faire markets do not.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#174

Post by splonk »

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

Assuming skiplagged is still doing hidden city ticketing, it's important to recognize the risks involved here (primarily that overuse of it may cause airlines to reject your bookings and/or shut down your frequent flier accounts). It's probably a reasonable tradeoff for someone just looking for the cheapest flight once, but likely isn't for frequent travelers.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#175

Post by chx »

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…

Thanks for BWM!

> I personally use a combination of ITA Matrix, Google Flights, and Skyscanner now

May I recommend http://azair.eu/ for low cost searches in EU? The UI is a bit weird when doing a one way as the label on the date pickers do not change but the meaning does, one is the earliest departure the other is the latest departure instead of return latest.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#176

Post by stjohnswarts »

cosmotic wrote: post #55

Hipmunk was simply the best. Very clean interface, no frills, quite thorough (except southwest), best presentation, easy to sort/evaluate ... A cute chipmunk. Looking at the three alternatives from all the other comments (google, matrix and skyscanner), they seem 5 or so years behind the times.

Southwest doesn't give out its pricing information at all. Which is why hipmunk didn't have it.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#177

Post by smabie »

rb808 wrote: post #162
dmix wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> owned by opaque equity groups. or owned by index funds, who really don't care much how management operates.

That's not true, Fink of BlackRock is always sending letters about something. Here's the most recent example:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/14/business/dealbook/larry-f...

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#178

Post by charlesu »

devcpp wrote: post #172
majormajor wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Oh hell no. More lawyers to find more loopholes. How about addressing the root cause: the lack of competition? The way to do this is lower the barrier to entry, which is made of 100% over-regulation. You can involve all the antitrust you want, as long as you don't lower the barrier to entry you're just lying to yourself and adding more useless middlemen.

Maybe but in this case, a lower barrier to entry wouldn't have helped but regulation would have.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#179

Post by stjohnswarts »

zck wrote: post #79
jedberg wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the team has already moved back to reddit. :)

As a random person who's been on reddit for over a decade now, it's really cool to see how close-knit the reddit team is. Partially I'm jealous, since I've never found anything even close to that.

I think being in the trenchs on small teams does that to you :) .

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#180

Post by hoistbypetard »

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…

It's been a couple of years since I did much air travel. When I did, hipmunk's sort was much better than Kayak's. Kayak was my favorite before hipmunk opened. Once hipmunk came along, I tended to use both when searching for flights, just to see if a better deal popped up on one but not the other.
Post reply on HN