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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

What alternatives exist to Hipmunk's display of flights? I've never seen a site with a similar display of flights by time, including display of the layovers, and easy ways to drag the earliest and latest start times to eliminate flights that aren't an option.

> ITA Matrix still has time bars, if you loved that UI

ITA Matrix doesn't seem to do anything like Hipmunk's UI.

> flights are just not that profitable. In North America, you'd be lucky to get 1-2% commissions. In the rest of the world, it's a bit better, but Hipmunk was definitely North America-first.

Why is that not enough? Does 1-2% not cover the (hopefully minimal) costs of performing such searches and calculations?

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1-2% is more of an upper bound. The numbers I've seen have been more like 10's of cents per conversion. And for whatever reasons, flight availability providers are not in the business of providing high throughput for clients, so the cost of performing those searches is probably considerably higher than you think. When I joined the travel industry I was shocked at what people considered reasonable latencies for availability calls, as well as the costs people pay just to get that level of performance.

If you want to make money in travel search, there's a lot more money in commissions for hotel bookings than in air.

That explains one of my pet peeves of all travel search sites that are primarily useful for air travel search defaulting to hotel search.

That’s surprising considering that there isn’t a Google Flights interface for hotels (I.e. an aggregator through which users can purchase hotel reservations through hotel providers directly)

It‘a roomkey.com , but Marriott/IHG/Hilton/Hyatt/Choice/Wyndham franchise most hotels and collect a 10% to 15% royalty of gross revenue from hotel owners, so they don’t care about commissions paid since it’s not coming out of their pocket.

https://www.google.com/travel/hotels

http://www.ai.mit.edu/courses/6.034f/psets/ps1/airtravel.pdf might help you understand why it's not a trivial problem

(I'm not saying 1-2% commission should or shouldn't cover the costs, just pointing out what goes into these engines).

And yet, there are a bunch of services that offer flight search (whether or not it is profitable), none of which (that I know of) with a UI (as this is just a UI issue) as good as Hipmunk :(.

This is mostly just a marketing thing, balancing the lead returns for flights with the companies ability to rank/sell ads on Google/elsewhere.

I'm sure the margins are low but given the competition you need high volume to really win and it's a highly competitive and fragmented space.

The UI alone is only part of the business model.

Thanks for posting that link! I came across that presentation several years back and found it quite enlightening. Then I thought of it for some reason a few months ago and tried Googling for it but couldn't find it. Very glad to stumble upon it again, and this time I'll definitely bookmark it.

Google flights lets you adjust your flight takeoff and arrival times as well as min/max layover length, although the way that info is displayed when you're looking for a flight isn't quite as good as Hipmunk

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