Why I don't use recent travel startups
blog.mozio.com
blog.mozio.com
The first time I read about Hipmunk solving "the problem of travel search", the first thought I had was "what problem?" I looked at Hipmunk and I couldn't see what it did that was so radically better than Kayak, which I think actually does a great job. If there are people who enjoy Hipmunk, then I say fantastic, but to me, travel search is not actually broken.
In the comments section I wrote what I believed to be a well-reasoned comment making similar comments to those made in the OP's post and was promptly downvoted and even received a sarcastic response from one of the founders. No big deal, but after close to a year, I still maintain that what I said was valid. Sometimes I think people get stuck working aggressively on a problem before they really confront the reality of whether the problem is real or an illusion that was created in order to build a business.
That said, I do think the site looks great and I hope it does phenomenally well. I don't have any ill-will towards the company or its founders, but I'm just not convinced that this is a startup that is built to solve its users' problems. It seems that a lot of successful smart people proclaimed that travel search was a major problem and that this was the solution, and that in turn got the business a lot of support. I'm just not convinced.
I also don't have any ill will towards Hipmunk, I think the product looks great. But yes, I also agree that, for flights, travel isn't 'broken' so badly. If it was, Hipmunk would be overflowing with users. Last article I read they were having trouble attracting new users.
Now for other forms of transportation . . . I'm going to have to disagree with you that travel isn't broken.
Social introduced a new opportunity to tap your friends for travel recommendations and tips but there lacked that follow up (hence Trippy which allows those who suggest places for you to visit to get updates when you check into those locations) that is so satisfying. It answers the question "so did you go to that place ..." when the trip is happening and not after.
Hipmunk is doing a lot of interesting things like integrating AirBnB listings and also revealing heatmaps for which areas of cities have the things people like to do like eat, party, vice, etc. so they know where they should be looking for a convenient hotel.
Gogobot, in my opinion, is better just layered on Facebook but they probably have the best chance of doing a better social recommendation algorithm given their leadership position in the space so I'm looking forward to seeing what comes out of that.
Since the Kayak launch waaaaay back, there really hasn't been that much travel startup innovation. If anything, the landscape has gotten more confusing and worst for consumers in my opinion. The average user checks over 3+ sites before booking because they just don't know where they can find the best prices. There's so much focus on monetization that everywhere you turn, you get pop-ups and more pop-ups and by the time you're done, you're not even sure how you ended up on the site you are on to buy your ticket, book your hotel, etc.
Over at our startup, Room 77, we are focused on a real travel search problem specifically in the hotel space. There's too much price fragmentation and the current solutions today aren't satisfying to us. For example, everyone offers a "best price guarantee" but everyone has a different price, so who's lying and who's telling the truth? Sites that claim to search all the other hotel sites show you 3 prices and then a bunch of links that open pop-ups to other sites. How is that a great user experience? We see a lot of opportunity to provide true price transparency in hotel search w/o compromising the user experience. Would love to get your feedback on our site, we've recently focused more on pricing transparency and less on our unique hotel layout and rooms database information.
I'm excited there's so much discussion on this travel related thread and happy to respond more when I get home later. Although I'm immersed in the hotel space now, I was part of the team at Farecast that became Bing Travel (fare predictions) so I can provide some insight there as well.
Every travel agency will let you search for flights based on price range, departure time, arrival time, and layover time. However, I usually don't care if a flight leaves at 5 or 4:45, or I'm willing to pay an extra $20 if it means my layover is reduced by an hour. With a normal search interface I'd either have to do multiple searches, or relax the limits of all the parameters and have to sort though a large breadth of results. On top of this, the results are presented in such a way that I need to consider a single variable at a time ("hmm okay this flight leaves a bit earlier, but it costs __ and arrives at ___. This flight has a minimal layover, but it leaves at ___ and costs ___").
In contrast, the interface Hipmunk has developed makes it exceedingly easy to view all the variables at once, and to quickly narrow down flights I'd potentially be interested in. Not only is the timeline interface much easier to understand than say expedia's "sort results by one variable at a time", but it's an intuitive way to compare the overall utility of multiple flights at once. And since at the end of the day that's exactly what I'm looking for in a travel website - an intuitive way to quickly compare numerous options and choose the 'best' one according to my personal heuristics - I use Hipmunk when I need to book a flight.
I've used it the last 3 times I've booked a flight, and I would never use anything else. It makes it so easy to get the flight we prefer it's ridiculous.
It is an order of magnitude better than kayak/priceline/whatever.
Putting down hipmunk before launching when you are going to compete with them with weak arguments like "sure its good but I use something inferior anyway"--seems.. transparent.
I have been told many times that you can't build a business to compete with the major players by being 5% better than them. You need to be 5x better than them, otherwise people won't switch. That is my point, and for me, I realized that the visualization of time data is not what bothers me every time I go to Kayak, so I wasn't really prone to switching.
I am merely trying to provide a little bit of introspection . . . and I guess I don't know what you expect. Yes we are putting out a travel product soon, but that doesn't invalidate my opinion on what is out there, and there is a reason a large portion of people still use Expedia etc. . . .
I argue that this is the main problem with the entire blog post. I would rather than Mozio actually showed why they are better than all of the social travel startups they mention, as opposed to disparaging them while their own homepage links to a Launchrock signup page.
The reason I no longer use Hipmunk is that every ticket I've gotten from them (4 round trips total) has been standby, and I was never told that when I bought it. I was moved to a later flight because I was standby on the last one and the experience was soiled for me.
But on mobile https://market.android.com/details?id=com.hipmunk.android "This app is incompatible with your Play HTC HTC Wildfire.". Well, all other work, I don't see a reason why a form to search results via an api shouldn't work on ANY device.
about me: i travel across the globe 1-4 times a month. see absolutely no reason to prefer it to kayak
i found that some YC-hardcore fans of hipmunk that love-love-love it travel few times/year at most.
What I usually do is find the cheapest offers for flights from a few selected places such as Hipmunk, Kayak, Ebookers and Momondo, and then proceed to find accommodation by myself. I have a few known places in certain cities already, found empirically and if I don't, I'll just search the web until I find a place I like. And that's pretty much it when it comes to travel.
What would make travel better, I don't know. The availability and access to good offers and good information over internet generally pretty much did it, I think.
Generally I'm immediately wary of any negative post that starts off with a disclaimer about how much respect the author has for the soon-to-be casualties of their rant. You're all buds, but you have no idea why their business needs to exist. Right.
People roll the bones on all sorts of dumb-sounding concepts, and yet we're all still humbled every time there's a big win and we didn't built it. So here's to hoping I'm wrong about nobody having a Mozio-shaped hole in their lives, right? Respect!
I'm also a bit surprised at all the presumably "startup" people who feel the need to lecture me on being a young upstart who doesn't know what he's talking about, with an unlaunched product, who supposedly knows better. Oh the irony of a bunch of people who rock the boat for a living jumping down the throat of a kid who has the audacity to criticize. It seems that criticism of the big bad companies is ok, criticism of one of our own, not so much.
Again, the article is from my perspective, on why I don't use it. You can say what you please about how intuitive it is and all the reasons why, but I don't use it, and I was trying to give some insight as to why. And I don't appreciate you making it seem like I don't respect Hipmunk, i made it abundantly clear I thought they had a wonderful product, I merely described why I didn't use it, and it seems like I'm not the only one who feels that way.
I'll ignore the quip about my own project haha.
FWIW I agree with the trying-too-hard aspect of forcing the square peg of social into a round hole sometimes, but the visualization of Hipmunk is better than Kayak. (I don't use Hipmunk to purchase because I find flights to be significantly cheaper direct from the airlines, however.) If you were used to Hipmunk you would also be loathe to change to new technologies that were marginally, but noticeably better. It is the nature of human "comfort cost" and the reason why poorer, older products still retain customers, at least for some period of time.
I think social data is much more useful as a filter for a curated list than it is when used on the set of ALL establishments in a city.
If the list is prefiltered to only include establishments that are at least excellent examples of whatever they are trying to be, social data is a useful way to figure out what to show the user.
Seeing what places my friends have been going to is much much less useful to me than a carefully assembled list of excellent places. For a great example of this, see "Tokyo by Tokyo." _much_ better than any social algorithmic solution can currently do.
Here's that link again: kickstarter.com/projects/1147214836/toc-guide-to-sf
The data it presents is great. It looks great, nice bells and whistles.
But it doesn't really improve over kayak. In fact it is slower and in some ways less useful. There is still a lot of room for improvement in the flight booking space.
I've always thought hipmunk was basically indistinguishable from ITA Matrix flight search (do a search and click "view time bars" to see what I mean) and ITA has been around forever.