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Comment by bryanh | Hacker News Reader

I love Hipmunk, but I think they assume their superior interface warrants pretty radical price increases (anything over 5% is kind of ridiculous considering how easy it is to compare prices for the exact same flights with another competitor).

Maybe I'm missing something here, but it's never been worth it for me.

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Price increases? We should have the same fares as everyone else online.

Spez, it took me no time at all to find a flight cheaper on Kayak than on Hipmunk. From Chicago to Honolulu (roundtrip) on 8/26 - 8/28, Kayak's cheapest rate is $936 total while Hipmunk's is $1063 total. This was my second search comparison between Kayak and Hipmunk. Not to be an ass, but this wasn't difficult at all, so you might want to incorporate some stricter testing before just saying that you "should have the same fares as everyone else online". Asking HN readers for examples when it's this easy appears as if you haven't done much testing and as if you're getting us to test for you.

One of the tough things about this stuff, as alluded in other threads, is how frequently inventory changes. I just ran the same search you described as close to the same time as possible and...

http://i.imgur.com/7jQsm.png

http://i.imgur.com/AUnb5.png

Both at $1063.

So timing can make a huge difference.

Weird...it's still the same prices ($1063 and $936) for me. You may very well be right though, but I find it hard to believe that it changes in the second or two it takes me to do my search on Kayak to HipMunk

http://i.imgur.com/a1VMw.png

http://i.imgur.com/W7dZg.png

I've seen this ORD -> HNL flight come up a couple times on this thread. So far, the prices that are better than ours seem to be flights with two connections, in a sea of results that only require one. I don't recall that exact algorithm off the top of my head, but that's the heart of the issue. This particular route seems to be a bit of an edge-case.

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