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Hipmunk Says Goodbye

hipmunk.com

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Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#301

Post by nitwit005 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #298
nitwit005 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

To trim the cost of a referral program, you shut down the referral program. Or cut the payout. That's not a reason to stop supplying data entirely.

There are a lot of sites that I would love if they had nice free APIs. People generally don't create those without a financial benefit.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#302

Post by ck425 »

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…

I'm not sure that's true. I worked for a flight meta search for years and that was never mentioned by anyone (we were very candid internally).

It is however true that consolidation of airlines gave them more bargaining power. For already established companies with access to a lot of customers (Kayak, Skyscanner, Google Flights etc) that came with pros and cons. But for smaller players like Hipmunk I can easily see how that would shift the balance of power towards the airlines, lowering margins and access to data.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#303

Post by ck425 »

anonu wrote: post #273
johnhess wrote: post #51

This is a shame, and says more about the consolidation of the tech industry than Hipmunk's product. One of Hipmunk's founders spoke to a course that I was in about their experience as a founder and how they were running their business. A few weeks later, a well known founder of another travel search company visited the class and said outright that if Hipmunk did have any success, that they would copy those features a…

> says more about the consolidation of the tech industry than Hipmunk's product I kinda disagree. Hipmunk did not have access to the data that gave users a complete pictures on all travel routes. Even if they had a nice UI/ux, the underlying data was incomplete. People naturally gravitated to sites where they found a route they wanted for the price they wanted.

That's true but it's also true that getting access to flight data is far easier the larger you get. Therefore the flights metasearch industry (and travel metasearch in general) will tend to consolidate to an extent.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#304

Post by benjaminRRR »

bitL wrote: post #24

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?

If there's one thing we do a reasonable job on it's multicity. Link in bio.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#305

Post by beachy »

nraynaud wrote: post #215
scottrogowski wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with (2) larger companies, and confirmed from conversations with friends, is that while you tend to have more support, you are often placed on individual siloed teams where you stay for years. I think the key benefit of smaller companies is that you can work across so many different aspects of the application. Process also tends to be less burdensome so you are able to devote more of your time to the te…

Someone told me they spend 2 years in a team responsible for some of the undo menu at a giant software company. Incredible siloing.

To be fair, adding apparently simple undo functionality to a complex transactional system can be fiendishly difficult.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#306

Post by einpoklum »

This makes me wonder... how should I compare all these flight search sites? I mean, you may notice one has some feature another don't, but is there something more methodical?

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#308

Post by Shinchy »

wpietri wrote: post #181
shadowgovt wrote: post #74

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…

I've worked extensively with various luxury brands that do this (to be honest almost all of them do). The reason is almost always brand integrity, they don't want consumers to think of their brand as being cheap so they only ever discount to a point. Add to that that some brands will allow unsold stock to be returned - obviously this means the seller will only reduce the price to a certain point before it doesn't make financial sense. And finally in some cases it makes more sense from a tax perspective to write off the unsold stock as a complete loss than sell it at a low amount.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#309

Post by aorth »

nathancahill wrote: post #38
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…

Oh no kidding, you're BookWithMatrix? Shooting you an email, your website has been life-changing.

I second that! Came here specifically to see if anyone mentioned BookWithMatrix. So cool. :)

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#310

Post by Grue3 »

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.

Momondo is my shit. Found lots of cheap tickets on it over the years.
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