Hipmunk Says Goodbye • Hacker News Board

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#321

Post by buro9 » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 1:03 PM UTC

fergie wrote: post #317

neonate wrote: post #244

It 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?

It's probably now integrated with their systems, and to disentangle would require engineering. You can argue that so long as the $$$ of the sale pays for it that SAP should sell it, but I would argue that if those engineers could be working on something else that is of higher value that you shouldn't try to sell it, especially if the cost of disentangling isn't well known.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#322

Post by Spooky23 » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 1:11 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #268

Spooky23 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? Airlines have a long history of self destruction through price wars. When I was in college, I would fly southwest to catch baseball games in Baltimore, for less than $100.

Sure. That's how competition works. But they claim is "kills an industry". As far as I know, people still fly to Baltimore despite a history of sometimes-low prices.

Airlines as an industry have killed themselves a few times. They exist due to benevolent acts of the US government.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#323

Post by bitL » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 1:31 PM UTC

How much does running a service like Hipmunk cost? It might not be a good business for the current owner, but it could be profitable for e.g. company of four people. Wouldn't it be better to give it back to Huffman and run it as a small project?

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#324

Post by welfare » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 1:31 PM UTC

bartkappenburg wrote: post #94

sdoering wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. Fixed within 12 minutes from notification in an online forum to production. I am impressed.

SSH'ed info the production server, pico index.php, saved file, done.

Production-Driven Development is the new cool.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#325

Post by edouard-harris » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 1:35 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #271

205guy wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

You say it isn't sustainable, but you also say Hawaiian is still going. Which is it? The claim was "kills an industry", but from what you say, the industry's still going. And you say the critical factor was "kept them away from the good gates", which is exactly the kind of thing that is solved with careful regulation, not deregulation.

I think the parent comment is saying that the situation of having a price war between too many players isn't sustainable. And it seems not to have been here, since all but one of those players either died or exited the market as a result, leaving the remaining one with monopoly pricing power.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#326

Post by bbarn » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 1:48 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #188

devcpp wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh hell no. More lawyers to find more loopholes. How about addressing the root cause: the lack of competition? The way to do this is lower the barrier to entry, which is made of 100% over-regulation. You can involve all the antitrust you want, as long as you don't lower the barrier to entry you're just lying to yourself and adding more useless middlemen.

The barrier to entry is definitely not "100% over-regulation". Starting an airline would be extremely difficult even if it were entirely unregulated. You need airplanes, pilots, and a variety of flight and ground crew. You need landing slots at busy airports. And then you need a customer base big enough to fill up your flights. Even if all of that were easy, you still want anti-trust regulation, because airlines are…

Look at what happened to Virgin America? It was a consumer-focused airline that was doing very well financially, and it was forcibly acquired because of regulations that US airlines must be US owned.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#327

Post by shadowgovt » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 1:48 PM UTC

anewvillager wrote: post #315

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…

> 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?

They aren't colluding to keep prices high; they're each individually deciding what their MAP should be, but the minimum MAP in the system may be higher than the minimum some consumer is willing to sell for, so that sale offer won't show up on an online shopping center.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#328

Post by zebrafish » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 1:52 PM UTC

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…

Retailers will never take less profit in the long run. Especially in industries where ROIC is extremely important. The retailer will always squeeze the manufacturer and the manufacturer, depending on the volume of the account, will typically fold to keep the (extremely expensive) line running. This plays out over long time horizons (a few years) but eventually price erosion will happen and capacity will go offline.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#329

Post by ng7j5d9 » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 2:07 PM UTC

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 think to offer a differentiated product in this space, you have to be hostile towards the airlines. I know that Skiplagged will show me hidden city tickets that I won't find elsewhere. I know that Scott's Cheap Flights will alert me to fares so cheap that they seem like pricing mistakes. All of the aggregators that play ball with the airlines just offer the exact same results.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#330

Post by degenerate » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 2:35 PM UTC

splonk wrote: post #234

stjohnswarts wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Southwest doesn't give out its pricing information at all. Which is why hipmunk didn't have it.

It does to certain business travel platforms (search for "swabiz"), and I believe they're expanding that exposure through their integration with Amadeus. Whether they plan it make it available on consumer sites eventually, I don't know.

I'm going to make the assumption that if Hipmunk and other non-paying aggregators were to scrape their site for the pricing data, they'd get hit with a lawsuit, right?