We need to use SAP Concur at work for travel booking. It is possibly the worst software I have used.
Hipmunk Says Goodbye
281–290 of 347 posts
Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye
#282Unrelated: it took me until this very moment to realize that hipmunk is chipmunk without the C. Is this the origin of the name and I am literally the last to figure it out?
Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
1-2% is more of an upper bound. The numbers I've seen have been more like 10's of cents per conversion. And for whatever reasons, flight availability providers are not in the business of providing high throughput for clients, so the cost of performing those searches is probably considerably higher than you think. When I joined the travel industry I was shocked at what people considered reasonable latencies for availa…
That’s surprising considering that there isn’t a Google Flights interface for hotels (I.e. an aggregator through which users can purchase hotel reservations through hotel providers directly)
It‘a roomkey.com , but Marriott/IHG/Hilton/Hyatt/Choice/Wyndham franchise most hotels and collect a 10% to 15% royalty of gross revenue from hotel owners, so they don’t care about commissions paid since it’s not coming out of their pocket.
Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everything Concur does, it does extremely poorly.
Question if anybody knows: did Concur used to be good, and then became trash after it was acquired by SAP? Or was it always clunky and hostile?
I think it's gotten better actually. The jurassic version we had to use at megacorp back in 2014/15 was the only reason I had a windows VM installed. Whatever newer version was deployed a few years later was actually almost usable.
And, yeah, if I did more traveling I'd probably just call up our travel agent. But I'd still be on the hook for cash expenses.
Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sorry. It's relevant to hn beyond the fact that it's a YC alum that coufounded it...
Not really. It's a flight-booking company. If Kayak or something got closed, it'd be deemed off-topic for HN. Kayak and Hipmunk do virtually the same thing. The difference? One was by a YC founder, the other has T.V. commercials.
That's just... not how HN works at all?
Companies don't have to have any relationship with YC to be linked or discussed on HN. Just... look at the front page. Plaid, for instance.
Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
Southwest doesn't give out its pricing information at all. Which is why hipmunk didn't have it.
Not very consumer friendly.
At the time when southwest cut them off, the online travel sites were expecting $5 to $10 in compensation. Offering the lowest price required trimming that cost.
News story from 2002: https://www.cnet.com/news/southwest-soars-without-travel-sit...
Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye
#287Did all the people at Hipmunk immediately quit? If not how come SAP Concur (TM) 's web interface still looks, works, and feels like something out of the IE6 era?
Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye
#288As 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")
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Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye
#289I worked for Hipmunk for a little over two years before they were purchased and have some fond memories of my time there. There have been a lot of articles on HN lately suggesting that it is better to work for a large company over a startup. Based on my time there, I would strongly disagree. I came in as a junior engineer (feral would be an appropriate term) and during my time, touched basically every part of the web…
But a lot of larger companies have great programs for junior developers that ensure they learn a lot. In my experience and stories I've heard it seems that you can have an amazing time as a junior developer at a startup. If it's a good one. It it isn't, you'll be absolutely miserable and have no support. Similarly, you can be at a large company with a fantastic program for junior developers and learn a lot. And you c…
Larger companies have great programs, but also have large company problems which in many ways often aren't IT problems.
Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. It's a flight-booking company. If Kayak or something got closed, it'd be deemed off-topic for HN. Kayak and Hipmunk do virtually the same thing. The difference? One was by a YC founder, the other has T.V. commercials.
That's just... not how HN works at all? Companies don't have to have any relationship with YC to be linked or discussed on HN. Just... look at the front page. Plaid, for instance.
I know how HN works pretty well, I think, and I understand the front page pretty well, too. Hipmunk isn't intellectually interesting on its own, and plenty of companies in the flight space close down daily; they're rarely relevant to HN. This is a marketing post, filled with marketing speak, and contains no substance. Under no circumstance would this be counted as intellectually interesting were it posted by any non-YC company (or one of 'patio11's I guess) as tiny as Hipmunk is. A quilt company in a town close to me closed down a few years ago; they made yearly what Hipmunk was purchased for. Didn't see their press release on HN, and it wouldn't be relevant to HN.
Plaid's posts were third-party articles, and they got purchased for a billion. This is ad copy. Users would not have upvoted this, because it's not on-topic, were it by a non-YC company.
I didn't even intend to be implying relevancy was required on HN (my submission history is filled with articles that aren't relevant to much of anything) with the original comment; my statement was intended to give context. The second comment, though, was devil's advocacy that I'm still going to stand by: it's nothing but silly to act like ad copy is relevant to HN inherently.