I think Hipmunk is facing an uphill battle. I don't want to be a naysayer because I want them to do well (and thereby have more choices), but ITA spent years and years to get the kind of buyout they're getting now.
I think Hipmunk is facing an uphill battle. I don't want to be a naysayer because I want them to do well (and thereby have more choices), but ITA spent years and years to get the kind of buyout they're getting now.
And matrix.itasoftware.com is indeed awesome-the query language lets you do incredibly useful stuff you cant to anywhere else. The hard part is then twisting the arm of orbitz/travelocity/etc to get you to book the exact same flights.
I've got a very different travel idea, and would love to be able to try it out, and send everyone to Orbitz to book it if they end up finding what they want on my site.
But without the data it is very hard to experiment in making a better travel site.
For bootstrapping a travel search product, you're best to get busy building crawlers to scrape airline websites directly.