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Comment by spez | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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)?

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