You asked for it, HN: Hipmunk adds Multi-City Searching and more | Hacker News Reader

You asked for it, HN: Hipmunk adds Multi-City Searching and more

blog.hipmunk.com

31 pointskn0thing22 comments

I love the addition of choosing alliances as your preferred airlines, but I still want a way of excluding airlines I hate (I will never give United or Air France my money again!)

When that happens, Hipmunk will be perfect :)

"Choose your nemeses" - that sorta thing sound about right?

Yeah, essentially. Hipmunk's "Agony" metric is one you use when you've already decided to compromise. I wouldn't need it if I had the money for my preferred airline (there's lots of good airlines if you can afford them). A "choose your nemeses" draws the line on the other end; the limit at which even a lower price won't make you compromise to fly on that airline.

And I really hate United and Air France.

Is there a way to send the results of a search to someone via e-mail or post it on Facebook/Twitter? I'd love to be able to send an itinerary to my Mom for her to purchase (she foots Thanksgiving trips home) or be able to say "hey, everyone, these are the flights I'm considering taking to NYC/SXSW/whatever - what do you think before we all book?"

Yes, you can share the URL of the results page*

*The results are stored in memcached and last ~24 hours. This will improve in the future.

Yay!

Back in the very early reddit days, Steve on at least one occasion waited for a user to request a certain feature via feedback and would push it a little while later. This of course gave the impression that he'd just put written that code for him :)

That said, it's nice to have the feature already there and just point someone to it.

If I do a multi city search and then decide I want a new search I like that you save my existing search parameters but I would like it even better if you provided a "clear all" button or something. What if I really do want a new search with no cities in common to my old search?

Yes... right now you can just replace those inputs. It doesn't require any extra clicking or typing.

Yeah, it requires me to double click and clear or type over the input for each text box... That's more clicking than I should have to do if all I want is a new multi city search from.

You only have to double-click once. Then you can TAB to the other fields. That's roughly equivalent to having a clear button.

I think implementing language/syntax to accomplish this would save even more time than having to tab/create row/etc.

To point an example, ITA allows you to choose connecting cities such as SFO::PHX, but that's only for connecting cities. If you can create a syntax for multiple cities, it may save some time.

I'm guessing this isn't possible because you don't have the data, but it would be great to have Southwest flights as well.

http://www.southwest.com/about_swa/terms_and_con.html They don't allow it.

I wonder if they can get around that by knowing the information, but not explicitly displaying it. For example, if one does a search and Hipmunk knows that Southwest has a plane scheduled at that time then they can provide a link to the Southwest website and a suggestion that "Southwest might have a time that's good for you." with a little "[?]" box beside it explaining that Southwest prohibits Hipmunk from explicitly displaying their info.

Obviously, another way would be Hipmunk getting authorization to use Southwest's data from Southwest.

Agreed. Even if you can't include certain low-cost carriers, any information that you could provide about these flights would be better than any other site has attempted, and would make your search results that much more useful. If I understand correctly, the actual flights don't change too often, so if you could simply put somewhere in the sidebar that Southwest (or RyanAir or whoever) provides a flight for the same route, it would be fantastic.

You guys are awesome! I just book round trip flight to Pasadena in less than 10 minutes.

Sorry this reply took so long (I just saw your comment). Thanks for the great testimonial. Pasadena is a lovely town - hope you have a splendid trip!

once you guys figure out a clean way to do flexible dates, you will be kings

We know how. It's just a matter of getting things together with our data providers.

>It's just a matter of getting things together with our data providers

would you elaborate?

Flexible dates is HUGE, I would plan vacations around cheaper airfare (as long as other circumstances line up too), but in the early stages of vacation planning, cost of flights is a major factor.

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