Comment by purplefruit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by purplefruit | Hacker News Reader

I was a relatively senior member at Expedia, and though there is an obvious bias, I think Hipmunk is a bit overrated. Here's why

(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.

1) Not sure what you're basing this claim on, but it's false.

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.

Ah re #1 - I was under the impression that you were actually using Orbitz inventory for hotels (flights are through GDS I assume - but barely make money anyway). re #2 - yah totally subjective and I have no data besides anecdotes re #3 - again I have no data to support this. Just generally incredibly suspect of any growth that comes from SEM (though there's clearly cases where it's worked). Good to hear there's some retention, though.

For hotels, we do get Orbitz inventory, but we also have a number of direct relationships. As you know, hotels are much happier to do business with people like us because they're not perpetually going out of business.

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.

Makes sense. I wasn't trying to dog on hipmunk too much. Like I said, I actually really like it. My biggest thing with the UI was whether or not non-analytically-minded people appreciate the nuances you guys are working on. Anyways, happy to chat more if you're interested. I can also fuck off :P

I can also fuck off

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.

I'm just being diplomatic, my friend. There's no reason for pointless confrontation on some internet forum. Though I appreciate the support, dawg.

Diplomatic is fine, but if you look at the other comments below, they all said what you said but not as eloquently, which is why you have the top voted comment. You represented everyone who voted that comment up.

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.

spez, any chance you'll implement something like http://www.kayak.com/explore/ but with your own touch (more options)?

You may be right about the relationships, and without that Hipmunk is vulnerable, but I think you're dead wrong about the UI.

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.

They've posted here[1] and elsewhere they're focusing on point 1 a lot, they're trying to cut out the middle men.

[1] http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2914125

in many cases you need to start off just being an affiliate, then once you grow your traffic enough to attract bigger partners, you can cut out the middlemen

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