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Hipmunk Says Goodbye

hipmunk.com

221–230 of 347 posts

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#221
I used to use Hipmunk, but at this point, I’ve built up a lot of airline loyalty and often find booking directly with the carrier or through a credit card portal (if I’m using points) for personal travel gives me the best fare. All my business travel has to go through Concur anyway, so search tools like Hipmunk and Kayak don’t matter, no matter how nice the interface.

When I didn’t fly all the time, I didn’t care about loyalty. But I did 160,000 actual airline miles (far more FF miles earned) last year (most of them on one alliance, but enough to get lowest tier status on two others) last year and at this point, I’ll pay extra for Delta because I get auto-upgraded to Comfort+ at booking, I have a very good baggage allowance regardless of service class (assuming I’m main cabin and not basic economy, which I wouldn’t do anyway), I have a lounge membership, and I get frequent upgrades. At that point, my comfort and those benefits are way more important than saving a few dollars across airlines.

And that’s the problem with these types of services, I think. They cater to the occasional traveler who doesn’t travel enough to make a profit (unless you’re Google and you own the software everyone else has to license), whereas the frequent travelers are either booking through corporate tools or directly with one airline because they have loyalty — or both.

Catering to then majority of flyers who fly once a year, when margins are what they are on flights, is a tough business. It is interesting that Hipmunk's parent company got a piece of my $60k in travel last year (most of that was work, maybe $2500 was personal), because that’s where your percentages can matter.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#222
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Everything Concur does, it does extremely poorly.

Because they don’t have real competition and what it does do (corporate travel management) it actually does well (in the backend). It’s front end and mobile app are pretty shit, however.

It does have some competition when it comes to expenses: Expensify, Netsuite, Salesforce and homegrown stuff come into mind.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#223

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.

You mean you liked the criteria by which Hipmunk sorted flights, e.g., by accounting for layover time rather than just by price? If so, not that Kayak has a "Best" sort (which didn't exist when Hipmunk appeared) that's now the default.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#224
post #40
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.

They and Expedia/Priceline were super super early into the game

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Twitter is a feature.

Are networking effects a product or a feature?

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 mi…

This exact scenario happened in Hawaii, a small regional market for local (inter-island) flights. There were 2 airlines (Hawaiian and Aloha) competing on price and service, but it was essentially a duopoly with moderate and almost identical prices. Then both started expanding their routes to the mainland US, got overextended when the next downturn hit and declared bankruptcy one after the other (they kept flying at the same prices while restructuring). One potential acquirer was Mesa Air, but they only looked at the books and started a 3rd competing airline (called Go) with $5 fares. So they started a price war, and Aloha never recovered and shut down (as they probably intended), but Go had only small jets and somehow Hawaiian kept them away from the good gates, so nobody liked them at the regular price. Now only Hawaiian is left, but at 50-100% more of the old equilibrium price. An archipelago like Hawaii needs air connections, but with too many players or too much price war, it's not sustainable.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#227

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?

For me it's because google flights is more responsive and faster with search results compared to kayak.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mi…

Of course not, because it's absolutely ridiculous. The theory doesn't pass the basic smell test, it utterly defies common sense. I don't know if this user is a shill for some retailer or just extremely gullible, but this kind of absurd misinformation shouldn't be welcome on this website.

Thanks for this opinion, was wondering how the GP was able to justify such a corporate-philic line of thinking

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mi…

The industry of mobile apps and games has seen rates go unsustainably low, often to 99c or free, causing them to make up the difference with in-app purchases, ad networks, tracking, and lots and lots of psychological tricks. Nobody can dare simply sell a game on the iOS or Google Play store for $5 or $10 anymore, because there's far more "free" ones out there. This has turned lots of people off of these storefronts.…

> Nobody can dare simply sell a game on the iOS or Google Play store for $5 or $10 anymore

Except that's patently false. All you have to do is look briefly on the iOS App Store and you'll find plenty of games for $5+. Sure, there are a lot more that are "free (with in-app purchases)", but the idea that no one can make money in the space is just totally absurd.

Furthermore, even if what you said was true, it would not be a genuine example of what the previous poster was describing, because people are still making money off those freemium games. What the other poster was describing was prices going through the floor, no one being able to make money in that space, and the entire industry drying up and blowing away.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#230

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.

It does to Concur.
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