Unrelated: 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?
You are definitely not the last since I hadn’t realized it either :)
Hipmunk Says Goodbye
311–320 of 347 posts
Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye
#312There'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…
Interestingly I have seen a source of arbitrage in the music/pro audio gear space. If I (in US) go to Thomann music (Germany) many non US origin goods are between 50-80% of the US MAP. Part of this seems to be exchange rate related but it also looks like a company like Thomann has more leverage on price. Even paying the flat 30 Euro shipping and 5-10 dollar foreign currency fee I save about 20-40%. That part infuriates me to the point Im tempted to start an import business. I’m not going to, but MAP is just price fixing with a nicer name.
Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye
#313Google Flights as my go-to option. Unparalleled speed, can iterate over 10 days with click of a button.
Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye
#314Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye
#315There'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…
> It's clearly anti-market practice (in the sense that it adds information asymmetry between some part of the market and consumers in an attempt to keep prices higher), but it's being done by hundreds to thousands of manufacturers and it's real unclear on what criteria it'd be considered illegal.
If sellers are colluding to keep prices high.. isn't this just a cartel?
Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye
#316Earlier 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…
Interestingly I have seen a source of arbitrage in the music/pro audio gear space. If I (in US) go to Thomann music (Germany) many non US origin goods are between 50-80% of the US MAP. Part of this seems to be exchange rate related but it also looks like a company like Thomann has more leverage on price. Even paying the flat 30 Euro shipping and 5-10 dollar foreign currency fee I save about 20-40%. That part infuriat…
M.A.P. is a US construction, it does not exist in Europe (or elsewhere).
Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye
#317It doesn't seem to be mentioned in this thread yet that the founders tried to buy it back: https://skift.com/2020/01/14/hipmunk-co-founders-spurned-by-...
"SAP Concur refused the offer. It intends to shutter both the Hipmunk consumer brand and the Concur Hipmunk business travel incarnation on January 23."
Do Sap Concur stand to gain by closing Hipmunk down? Why would they not take money for something they were going to destroy anyway?
Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tried delta.com but it wasn't able to find some international flights on their own alliance airlines. I called them about this and they confirmed this is done deliberately when booking using points. This made me lose confidence in delta.com and I went back to using Skyscanner. (Yes it's basically a scam that their "partner" airline flights are hidden when buying with points.)
Are you otherwise able to purchase those legs with points?
If your points are with Air France (another airline in the same "partnership") I believe you can. And if your points are with the exact same carrier as the flights you also can. But apparently points on one "partner" are not fungible with others, and you can't use Delta miles to book award flights on other carriers' websites.
This was when I found out that frequent flyer experts choose their "home" airline very carefully. To Delta's credit their points never expire...but if they block the flights I want what good are the points?
Their website offered me an alternative: fly with a different partner airline into the destination country then fly domestic on the airline that flies to the actual destination. That was bookable using (a lot of) points, but would make the journey twice as long.
Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye
#319This 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…
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.
Internet search was regarded as a feature right up until about 2000.
Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The financial benefit is getting flight bookings.
This is an API where the airline effectively charged a negative cost for use. If they decided it was too negative, why not try adjusting the price?