Hipmunk Says Goodbye

I use to work in the flight search industry. It is really hard to compete because you simply make nothing off of flights (your big margins are on hotels). I also doubt google let them hang on to the ITA matrix engine API since they seem to be closing that off to everyone. It is sad to see the last option for airbnb search in the metasearch space die off, but there are still plenty of good flight search engines out there.

> "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 show products below that price, and if they do the manufacturer cuts the high-density pre-digested feed of feature descriptions for the product).

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.

Many information asymmetries (even artificial ones) are not illegal, and indeed, even the moral argument for changing the law may not be as cut-and-dry as one assumes at first glance (for example, 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).

That's an extremely niche transaction and when I'm waiting to check my bag I'm glad I don't have to wait for someone who can't use the website to try and book a trip. I can't believe you waited and were told to go to the website and decided to wait again just to make sure. What's wrong with united.com?

If it's through my usual airline I just book through the site or app, it takes a few seconds as they already have all of my information from pre-check to billing. Otherwise Google Flights is a great search interface and gives you a link to book directly through the airline.

I almost think I want a new kind of search these days, for which flights are actually cheapest, not just on ticket face price.

I want to know if I have to pay $30 each way to check a bag, or try to pack something that will fit in overhead, not trigger a TSA panic, and then struggle past everyone else's delays in security and boarding because they wanted to save $30 and are trying to carry on a bag they can barely lift over their head.

I want to know if they have created some "special class" that you have to pay $50 to be in, or wait twice as long at poorly staffed "regular" desks.

I want to know if they're skipping included meals on longer flights in favor of charging inflated prices.

I want to know if they're charging more for more desirable seats, both in location and comfort.

I want to know if they paywalled any other things that used to be standard.

I really liked Hipmunk's interface and used it to dream often.

What I want out of airline aggregators, and what GFlights seems to do alright at:

  * Multi-city itineraries
  * Source and destination searches based on region/airport group (e.g. "AUS or DFW or IAH -> MUC or LHR)
  * Date range searching for flexible schedules and pricing

One of my example searches recently:

I want a flight from somewhere in Texas to somewhere in western europe, then to Dublin, then back to somewhere in Texas. I want to go for 9-13 days in February or March. Show me results by price.

GFilghts seems to do this pretty well. I used to like Hipmunk, but I don't know if it had any competitive advantage over other systems mentioned here. They certainly pushed the envelope, even influencing the tools we name today.

And to other comments, it is indeed unfortunate that pricing data is so obscured by airlines. Another instance in which the government should mandate more transparency.