Hipmunk Says Goodbye

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 and that Hipmunk couldn't threaten their position. That is exactly what happened.

To boot, Hipmunk was acquired and shuttered by another travel conglomerate.

RIP poor hipmunk. Been a huge fan of their site.

A sign to never drop the ball and always keep innovating!

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.

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 don’t use it. Goldstein explained why. He noted that after the wave of consolidation among airlines during the Obama years, airlines stopped allowing his site to have access to pricing data unless they hid certain routes to consumers. This move to avoid competition destroyed the business and harmed consumers. (It’s also obviously illegal, and the Department of Transportation has antitrust authority it doesn’t use to stop it.) Why did Goldstein speak publicly? Hipmunk sold itself off and he’s no longer there."

It's brutal because of lack of easy access to data, and more importantly, the ability to create bookings. IATA NDC API's should theoretically change this and get around the GDSs but I'm not holding my breath.

I've had a number of travel startup ideas but all were held back by access to data.