Hipmunk Says Goodbye

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 lucky to get 1-2% commissions. In the rest of the world, it's a bit better, but Hipmunk was definitely North America-first.

Concur never was a consumer company and Hipmunk never was going to make a ton for them, so it was just a matter of time. RIP -- a lot of their best features (not just showing the cheapest flights, but the "Best" based on agony) have made it into all major meta-search tools, so it's not for nothing!

(Also, I personally use a combination of ITA Matrix, Google Flights, and Skyscanner now. ITA Matrix still has time bars, if you loved that UI; Google Flights is just so fast, and Skyscanner searches low-cost carriers that Google Flights sometimes misses)

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/hipmunk

This is sad - Hipmunk greatly facilitated my digital nomad lifestyle at some point as I could chain multiple flights in multiple months together to make "a travel around the world" schedule, i.e. 1 month intervals Boston->Miami->Zurich->Kyoto->Sydney->Auckland->Honolulu->Vancouver->San Francisco, all without any return flights and spaced as I liked.

Is there any other service allowing the same?

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, or not.

One of my first technical interviews after teaching myself to code was with Hipmunk. They were incredibly nice and patient with me despite me being a clueless bundle of nerves, and I learned a lot from their very practical take home challenge, although by the time I had finished it they already hired someone. Thanks to them though I came to love working with Redis and Tornado (Python async framework). It's a fond memory and I'm disappointed to hear about this.

I hope that the team are able to quickly find other roles and don't find their lives too disrupted by this.

I wonder how much of the original Common Lisp code is still running in the QPX[1][2] part of ITA.

[1] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2491#comment-38434

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1479107