Hipmunk Lands A Big Acorn: ITA Will Help Power Their Airfare Results

If they're getting access to the whole QPX feed, this is a great step forwards for the Hipmunk guys. Matrix - the gold standard in flight-finding websites - is powered by QPX, but its weakness has always been its less-than-great UI. Sure, Hipmunk won't get Matrix's routing language (a small DSL that allows incredible precision in specifying the flights you'd like it to return), but the people that use it wouldn't be interested in something like this anyways.

Congrats to the Hipmunk guys!

I'm at the PhoCusWright conference where Adam and Steve announced this today. They did a fantastic job and I'll be shocked if they're not selected as the summit winner. They weren't afraid to take friendly shots at the established players (like Kayak), which was very refreshing.

I think there is an important lesson to be learned here. We've been searching for flights online for over a decade, and yet there is still room for what (now) seems like ultra-obvious innovation. You can bet that flight search is not the only market where looking at a problem through the lens of "what's best for the user" can lead to a winning business.

Moment of Zen from Adam's presentation: why does Orbitz even have a checkbox for "I prefer nonstop flights"? (Worse, it isn't even checked by default!) Got a big laugh from the crowd- nervous laughter from some, I'm sure.

Google just recently acquired ITA.

http://www.google.com/press/ita/

As a result of this deal, I am left wondering if Google is interested in acquiring Hipmunk.