Comment by MatthewB | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MatthewB | Hacker News Reader

I have used hipmunk a handful of times and it is dead simple to use.

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.

#1 We do our best to mitigate this. Unfortunately, it's also the nature of the business. Availability is constantly changing. What's really mindblowing is that Orbitz will often have flights in their own results that will error out. This isn't specific to Orbitz either, everyone has to deal with this.

#2 This is a big priority for us. We already have many direct deals, and more are on the way.

How about #3? Maybe the lack of response to that means you're already working on it:)

Take a look at vroomvroomvroom.com. It's the site I always use for booking rental cars. Simple UI and no hidden fees.

#1 We do our best to mitigate this. Unfortunately, it's also the nature of the business. Availability is constantly changing.

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).

I can't agree with #2 enough, I've actually emailed support about it. The entire hipmunk experience feels ruined when I get forwarded to Orbitz.

Agreed. In the past, I've used hipmunk to find a flight, and once I found myself forwarded to Orbitz, went to the airline's site and looked up the same flight manually.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com