1 year on, Hipmunk (YC S10) hits 1 million flight + hotel searches a month
xconomy.com
xconomy.com
(1) They don't own any relationships with suppliers. UI/UX matter, but any business owner will tell you that those relationships are where the money is. Hipmunk still has to give 50%+ of it's earnings away to those who own the relationships.
(2) Hipmunk's differentiating factor is its UI/UX, but frankly, I don't think it's all that amazing. Its structure and optimization are great for nerds like me who read hacker news, but try getting your parents (or people who spend big bucks booking travel) to use it. I have, and the resounding response is how difficult it is to use. Again, there is a market for their product, but I think it's designed by nerds for nerds
(3) 1 million flight + hotel searches a month is actually nothing with respect to the market, especially considering how much I see ads for hipmunk. Anyone can make a white-label travel site and pay for traffic.
I'm not trying to be a contrarian just to be an asshole. And Hipmunk might have great things in the pipeline, but for now, they're one of hundreds of travel sites in my opinion.
2) To each his own, I suppose, but I have conflicting anecdotal evidence. Hipmunk passes the "parents test" with all of our parents :) And as for "people who spend big bucks booking travel," I can point to the huge amount of email we receive from assistants who use us exclusively. Maybe we're not everything to everyone, but we're at least making some people very happy.
3) We do re-target quite a bit, and that's probably what you're seeing. Most of our growth has come organically, which again speaks to the fact that we actually do help people find planes / hotels in far less time than our competitors, including Expedia.
We've experimented with SEM, but it's not really cost effective for us. Everyone else in the business runs their own ads, giving them an ad-arbitrage business model we simply don't have. The upside to our customers is that the site is cleaner, the downside is our margins are skinnier.
What? Grow a pair. Everything you said in your first post is most certainly valid. These guys are full of shit and you called them on it, then you backed off on the first confrontation. I think you can do better than that.
Diplomatic is, "I wish you guys luck." It is not backing off your statement at the first sign of any sort of resistance to it.
The fact that old people don't "get" it just means they are used to the old UIs regardless of how crappy they are (a lot of them still call a travel agent due to sheer annoyance at the complexity of booking flights online). Most people do want the information that Hipmunk puts at your fingertips, and over time it will spread by word of mouth, and the younger generation who easily groks this type of UI will replace the aging population who hasn't grown up with deep data visualizations in their every day life.
Not every flight search is terrible on Orbitz/Expedia/Kayak, but I've done a few where all I could see was shit flights for pages and pages of results, and one search on Hipmunk yielded an obviously superior and amazing itinerary for $10 more.
Hipmunk may be weak on the pure business side, but they are one in a million on the UI side, and I predict that strength will take them places.
EDIT: Okay, I tried Hipmunk for an upcoming flight.
Pros: It offers a 30 day window for a flexible date search as opposed just 7 days on Kayak. Pretty interface.
Cons: Far fewer search options. My fare was $150 cheaper on Kayak! (Chicago to Hawaii over New Years).
London to Toronto (cheaper with CanadianAffair.com)
Halifax, Canada to JFK (cheaper on US Airways site)
Edmonton, Canada to LGA (cheaper on US Airways site)
They're all at least partly non-US, but I was able to find similar price discrepancies with flights from NYC to SF and Seattle. For example, I am quoted $398 ($441 tax-in) for a flight from LGA to SEA round-trip from Aug 25 to Sept 8. Hipmunk gives me tickets from $398 each way, so I'd be paying twice as much minimum.
In Europe, I've found SkyScanner.net to be generally cheaper because they have more discount airlines (namely Jet2, easyJet, and GermanWings; I avoid RyanAir)
This tripped me up the first time as well. That price is $398 round trip on Hipmonk. They show the best round trip price, not the best one way price. They say "from $398" to indicate that the best you can do is $398 if you pick the correct return flight.
For what it's worth the other flights were one-way so my misunderstanding doesn't affect the price difference.
Hipmunk: $1092. Kayak: $917.
(Both reservations have one layover in each direction and include tax. Kayak sends me to United.com directly while Hipmunk takes me to Orbitz.)
The Kayak number doesn't include fees and taxes, whereas the Hipmunk number does.
Admittedly Kayak has one flight for $870 and a few for $896, but they involved two stops.
The UI is clean and great, but its search is just not comprehensive as local competitors.
On the flip side, competitors also don't have all the data (company's site usually has data no-one else has).
I do have a few problems with it:
1. There have been a few times that I have found a flight only to click through to another online flight aggregator (orbitz etc) to find they don't have the rates specified on hipmunk. Very frustrating.
2. I hate, hate, hate dealing with other aggregators (again..orbitz etc). I don't know if they do this already or it is in their long-term plan, but Hipmunk would benefit from working directly with Airline companies. Apologies if they already do this and I didn't see it.
3. This is less of a problem and more of a request: rental cars! Please do for rental car search what you did for flight search. It took me hours to find a car to rent after searching through the usual suspect's websites (hertz, budget, avis). Their websites are beyond terrible. For example, I went to select the pickup location for a rental car (on Budget) and when I clicked the location, the page reloaded with zero error feedback. I assume there was a problem with my selection but how was I suppose to know what it is? I clicked all the options and it just kept reloading the page. Terrible.
Hipmunk is a great product tackling a hard problem. However, they have a lot of work to do. I will continue to use them and hopefully they will continue to improve. Great job so far.
#2 This is a big priority for us. We already have many direct deals, and more are on the way.
It's not just changing inventory though, I've had the same experience repeatedly over multiple days. hipmunk quoted me an itinerary, sent me through to (I think) US Airways to purchase it, and US Airways said it was no longer available and here's the same thing for $200 more. Gave up, tried again a few days later, hipmunk is still quoting the same fare.
Only happened for that one fare that one time, though. And I do love hipmunk and use it regularly. (Far more for speculating about places I'm thinking of going than for actually making bookings, I'm afraid).
Maybe I'm missing something here, but it's never been worth it for me.
Both at $1063.
So timing can make a huge difference.
I can see how in some cases it'd be great. If I'm looking for a hotel convenient to, say, the Denver Convention Center, then I can zoom in on that area and pick my favourite out of the small number of hotels within walking distance.
But if my goal is "I want a room somewhere in San Francisco, I don't especially care where as long as it's reasonably convenient, but it has to be reasonably good value but not too cheap" then I just get overwhelmed by having too many options and no obvious way to narrow them down (except by geography, which in this case I don't care too much about). And while I can easily understand "agony" as a function of price and duration, precisely what "ecstasy" should mean is beyond me.
Oh, and it seems to only tell me the average yelp rating, rather than the actual star class of the hotel, so it's really hard for me to decide whether $169 for the "Hotel Abri", with four yelp stars, is better or worse value than $106 a night for the "Hayes Valley Inn", also with four yelp stars. And then the Four Seasons, for $501 a night, gets 4.3 stars, but does that mean it's only slightly better than the Hayes Valley Inn? Probably not. Yelp stars generally aren't that useful except for identifying really awful places, since everywhere seems to rate somewhere between 3.5 and 4.5.
What I'd really like to see is information on how the price being asked for this hotel right now compares to the average price at which it's usually sold.
The prices for my most recent trip were the same for what I searched on Kayak actually, but it may be because that it was more short notice (2-3 weeks in the future).
It's the old reddit crew, so that's a big chunk of loyal users right there.
They're trying to build excitement again, but if you ask Hollywood they will tell you that you can't make people like something they don't, no matter how much you market it.
It's hard to compete against established brands like Expedia, and Orbitz that has millions to play with.