Hipmunk now indicates which flights have Wi-Fi
blog.hipmunk.com
blog.hipmunk.com
If you're a start-up and you're directing people to your blog, please, please, please make an obvious and easy link from the blog to your startup's homepage. Don't hide it in the sidebar, don't make the 'home' link on the blog go to the blog's homepage, don't waste the damn traffic.
Make it brainless for me to get from your blog to your startup's homepage.
Annoys me too.
I do appreciate the feedback!
To the immediate right of "home," the links "flights" and "hotels" link to their respective searches, but thanks for the anecdotal evidence. I'll give it a tweak right now.
I've been experimenting with placements and sizes since day 1. The buttons on the footer of each post are doing pretty well so far (but they're still a new edition).
date update: Turns out the referrals to hipmunk from the blog were practically tied for second highest ever, so perhaps we should just keep drawing attention to our funnel methods ;) Realizing you totally missed the next 2 links beside home (flights / hotels) was a good prompt to update that section. Thanks for that.
Hipmunk is great and all, but I fail to see how a travel site adding an icon is relevant to the HN frontpage.
1) The form at the beginning is much more confusing. Creating a search with Hipmunk is much less complicated. 2) Flights are ordered by price, whereas Hipmunk orders them by "agony", which in my experience, seems to be pretty accurate. 3) Doesn't default to time bar mode, like Hipmunk does.
This does give a compelling reason to join YC, though: plenty of cheerleading around YC startups.
Really, the cheerleading is a legitimate reason to do YC, apparently.
If my laptop/iPad dies, knowing the internet is available goes from awesome to super painful.
http://www.amazon.com/New-Trent-iCruiser-IMP1000-Blackberry/...
I got one for a flight to Hong Kong. iPad ran constantly for >16 hours, and it was also handy for topping off an iPhone when batteries ran low. Well worth the cash if you travel for extended periods.
I'd love to quickly be able to compare the costs of checking luggage, cancellation insurance costs, etc.
I've always thought the downfall of the airline industry is our (consumers') own fault; we search by price and only seem to deviate from price as our main criteria on occasion in the name of loyalty plans.
As to whether airlines will be inspired to install more wi-fi, consider this: all the major US airlines that don't already have wi-fi on their entire fleet have announced plans to install it on a lot more of their fleet this year. They're hoping people—especially business travelers—will make their purchasing decisions on the basis of wi-fi.
There are two main techs for on-board WiFi:
* Air-to-ground radiotelephony (what AirFone[0] used to use), which works like cell phones except for the sky, and with not cell towers and on a different frequency band. So not really like cell towers. This is the technology of Aircell's Gogo (which seems to be Hipmunk's partner on there) and LiveTV's. Advantage is that it's pretty cheap (~100k/plane of equipment), but it will only work over land (as it's based on ground antennas)
* Satellites, this is Row44's technology (via HughesNet), the tech is far more expensive to setup in planes but more flexible and works across oceans. As far as I know, Row44 is only being implemented by SouthWest and Norwegian Air Shuttle. Alaska Airlines tried it (and the trial was successful), but decided to go Aircell GoGo for cost reasons.
So, communicating with the internet isn't the problem, they just don't offer a network for customers to join with their own devices (possibly for cost purposes, possibly they have bandwidth worries or possibly they just haven't got round to it yet.)
I always found Hipmunk to be fairly average to-and-from Australia. In fact, as an example: to fly from Perth to Shanghai, the cheapest/least agonising flight is $1477.
Direct via Singapore Airlines' website, with the same amount of agony (just the one transfer at Changi (Singapore)) is $1126, flying with the one airline the whole time (even better!). There's also the Cathay Pacific option at $1136 odd.
Hipmunk is probably darned good in the US, by all accounts, but internationally it's a bit weak.