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Hipmunk Says Goodbye

hipmunk.com

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Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#181

Post by wpietri »

shadowgovt wrote: post #74
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…

> "It’s also obviously illegal" I'm not sure it's as obvious as the author assumes. In the shopping sector, there's a concept of 'minimum advertised price' that every online store respects, which is set by manufacturers under the same carrot-stick arrangement (i.e. it's the price the manufacturer believes would drive the value of the entire market sector down if it were common, shopping aggregators aren't allowed to…

> if sale below M.A.P. drops the bottom out of a market and kills an industry, the product can disappear from common production and the consumer doesn't benefit in the long run

Is there an example of this happening anywhere in recent history? I ask because it seems absurd to me that there is an industry so fragile that retailers taking a bit less profit would lead to sudden, total collapse. (And doubly absurd this might apply to airlines.)

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#182

Post by chipotle_coyote »

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.

At least on its face, I don't buy that high barriers to entry in every market is "made of 100% over-regulation." Depending on the market in question, there may be extremely high capital costs that have little to do with regulation. What you're trying to do may be highly dependent on partners who be motivated not to give you the best products/services available at reasonable prices. Competition may be entrenched simply by virtue of having been in business much longer than their new competitors, taking advantage of their scale in ways that startups can't -- including locking up potential customers through contracts.

I don't have experience in Hipmunk's field, but I do have experience, in another life, with CLECs, "competitive local exchange carriers." CLECs bloomed thanks to deregulation of their industry in the early 1990s, which is great -- but they were virtually all gone within a decade, not due to re-regulation but to the simple fact that achieving scale and profitability was monumentally expensive and difficult. The company I was at, Intermedia Communications, was bringing in close to a billion dollars of revenue annually by the time they threw in the towel and agreed to be purchased... and they still hadn't come close to turning a profit. But by that point the writing was already on the wall, and the industry was collapsing from hundreds of players to dozens. (The rise of wireless, of course, was the final death blow, but the industry was basically undead by then.)

I don't take Hipmunk's demise as a sign of "too much regulation" at all; airlines went through a similar contraction to CLECs, and what killed Hipmunk -- airlines choking off their pricing data -- will act to prevent any new competitors. That's not a function of too much regulation -- it's a function of not regulating the right things. What if airline pricing data was subject to FRAND ("fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory") licensing?

Regulation is absolutely used too often to protect incumbents, but you simply can't blame lack of competition in every industry on too much regulation. Arguably, when implemented correctly, regulation can increase competition, not harm it.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#183

Post by munificent »

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.

If you remove regulations, businesses will raise barriers to entry. Businesses don't like to compete. Competition is a zero-sum game that they might lose. Instead, they prefer to form cartels and turn it into a non-zero sum game where they all win (and consumers all lose).

World history clearly shows that lack of regulation inexorably leads to trusts, cartels, price fixing, price dumping, and all sorts of other anti-competitive agreements. It's trivially easy for a monopoly or cartel to raise their own barriers to entry to maintain their hegemony.

In fact, there's a good argument that the governmental barriers to entry you are lamenting were in fact driven by entrenched businesses as an example of regulatory capture and not a flaw in regulation itself.

If you let businesses get so big that not only are they not regulated, but they have taken over control of regulation itself, you're in a real pickle.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#184

Post by monksy »

ape4 wrote: post #58

As a Canadian, a feature I'd really like... request no stops in the USA. eg when flying to South America. (USA is a great country but doesn't get "in transit")

That being said, I would completely love to specify stopovers as the flight path, also completely avoid airlines (even fi they're codeshared). (I.e. Leftouthansa)

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#185

Post by soyiuz »

charlesu wrote: post #178
devcpp wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How would you lower the barrier to entry into something like Facebook or Amazon? Or Google trips for that matter? Or in this example, Hipmunk?

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#186

Post by monksy »

reaperducer wrote: post #26
Multiplayer wrote: post #14

I had the weirdest experience at the airport yesterday, LAX. I went to the the United ticket counter to buy a ticket for lax to nyc, same day. They told me I was better off buying online. In fact they looked completely unprepared to book a ticket. I couldn’t believe it. I checked other counters and sure enough, I was at the right place. So I tried using Hipmunk yesterday. It felt tired to me for some reason. I ended…

Lots of weirdness in travel these days. The last time I booked a flight on Delta (October) I found out that it can no longer handle cash payments at the airport. Not for anything. Not tickets, not baggage fees, not upgrades. Nothing. They direct you to a place in the airport where you can guy a Visa gift card with cash and then pay for what you need from Delta. I don't know if that's true of other carriers these days…

DO NOT EVER buy a ticket with cash. It's silly since it's the nation's currency.

Yes, it is silly you can "avoid it" by other card methods. But at least theres a longer trail associated with that, and probably puts you at a lower risk of being labeled as a concern.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#187

Post by akira2501 »

shadowgovt wrote: post #74
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…

> "It’s also obviously illegal" I'm not sure it's as obvious as the author assumes. In the shopping sector, there's a concept of 'minimum advertised price' that every online store respects, which is set by manufacturers under the same carrot-stick arrangement (i.e. it's the price the manufacturer believes would drive the value of the entire market sector down if it were common, shopping aggregators aren't allowed to…

> and if they do the manufacturer cuts the high-density pre-digested feed of feature descriptions for the product

Are you sure that's the case? Most descriptions of MAP I've seen incorporate a "shared" advertising budget that the manufacturer will stop paying if you don't abide by the MAP. This is a subtle but significant difference in actual implementation, further, while this may be acceptable under current federal law or at least the current interpretation they aren't the sole holders of anti-monopoly jurisdiction.

> (for example, if sale below M.A.P. drops the bottom out of a market and kills an industry

That's an incredibly long tail argument. How likely do you think is to actually happen? Is there any evidence this would occur? Is this endemic to all industry, or just to those who rely on these pricing agreements to hold market position?

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#188

Post by wpietri »

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.

The barrier to entry is definitely not "100% over-regulation". Starting an airline would be extremely difficult even if it were entirely unregulated. You need airplanes, pilots, and a variety of flight and ground crew. You need landing slots at busy airports. And then you need a customer base big enough to fill up your flights.

Even if all of that were easy, you still want anti-trust regulation, because airlines are a cutthroat business. If you start up NerdBird Inc, specializing in SF-Austin flights, it is absolutely in the interests of United and American to undercut you on that route for as long as it takes to drive you out of business. Which will probably not be very long, as airlines are expensive to run and margins are thin.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#189

Post by monksy »

ulfw wrote: post #70
Multiplayer wrote: post #14

I had the weirdest experience at the airport yesterday, LAX. I went to the the United ticket counter to buy a ticket for lax to nyc, same day. They told me I was better off buying online. In fact they looked completely unprepared to book a ticket. I couldn’t believe it. I checked other counters and sure enough, I was at the right place. So I tried using Hipmunk yesterday. It felt tired to me for some reason. I ended…

I'm a bit confused. You'd go to the United ticket counter in person but then don't go to united.com when asked to book online? May I ask why that wasn't your first choice for this particular incident?

Why go to UA.com when you can talk to a person that can tell you about the plane loads, what has more availability with FC/B. Also if you're flying that day, they can tell you more about the backpressure on flights. Not everything has to do with the cheapest price.

Most of the airlines like to complain that people are only focused on the price. They market themselves and try to make themselves look at price. They don't offer a lot of transparency on their product and they complain why people are using their site as intended. (Or avoiding it with comparisons)

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