Announcing Hipmunk's $15M Series B Funding
blog.hipmunk.com
blog.hipmunk.com
Yes yes, I know about burning cash (err, growing) as fast as possible to lock down winner-take-all markets, but travel booking doesn't seem like one of those. There doesn't seem to be any switching cost other than typing a different url in the browser. I don't see any network effects. Am I missing something?
This is a business with revenue streams and cash flow. They've been around for two years. They've already raised more than $5mm. When I hear "we raised another venture round" my gut reaction is concern, not congratulations.
As far as the product goes: The UX is nice. But every time I tried hipmonk, the prices were higher than what I found elsewhere, so I stopped using it.
Same here, love the UX but when I first tried it a couple of years ago, prices were higher. I tried it again only a couple of weeks ago and prices were still much higher. It looks like hipmunk is an engineer driven company focused on technical stuff (great UX, no ads) but what's important here is getting the best deals with flights providers and they're still not there yet, even two years after the launch.
1) for customers price is more important than UX
2) price is a relationship, not discovery, game
You can't get access to the really deep deals without relationships, and if you are not the primary you have to undercut competition.
IMHO the best play is to build the UX and then flip it to a company like Kayak.
Can you be more specific? We (Hipmunk) get our data from the same places that most everyone does, fares aren't really something that's variable from site-to-site (Southwest aside)
The only thing I can think of is that we list fares after taxes and fees, and many other sites list fares before them
I think the purpose of Hipmunk (and what makes it different) is that it takes more things into account than price, right? You prioritize flights that have the most optimal times with the best price, am I correct? I found they were most similar when you selected price as your priority when looking flights.
If anything, a feature I think I'd enjoy would be a fare predictor because most aggregators to have this feature and it's nice to know when you should buy.
Hipmonk, $245: https://img.skitch.com/20120613-8rregkqr2exgrcppt87j8hggy8.j...
Kayak, $179: https://img.skitch.com/20120613-gjy1r3as42atrp3ack1m24eyc8.j...
For some reason Hipmonk isn't finding the $179 United flights. That $179 includes taxes and fees.
In addition, Hipmonk's flexible search is far more limited than Kayak's. Hipmonk allows +2 days for a total of 3 possible. Kayak searches +/- 3 days, for a total of 7. Also Kayak has the "nearby airports" feature which often drops the price even further (Louisville is $149) - especially in the Bay Area where SFO and OAK are both a bart ride away.
Actually you can change that text field to say "+-3". We're both using the same feature of our mutual data provider ITA. And if you search for the same day this way, you get the same fares on both sites.
> Also Kayak has the "nearby airports" feature which often drops the price even further (Louisville is $149) - especially in the Bay Area where SFO and OAK are both a bart ride away
We do that automatically when you give us a city name (like "San Francisco" vs "SFO"). You can also just add comma-separated airports if you know the codes.
I don't pretend our UI exposes these the best, but we really are getting the same data from the same companies.
Wow, that is a totally hidden feature. Even worse, if you click the + button, it tops out at +2 and then greys out. Same with the - button and -2. My offhand suggestion is 3 buttons: plus adds days after, minus adds days before, and a third that resets to day-of only.
We do that automatically when you give us a city name (like "San Francisco" vs "SFO").
Also a completely hidden feature. You can probably help mitigate that by putting "San Francisco, CA (and nearby airports)" in the dropdown list.
You're alienating all of the flexible-dates travelers right on the first page... seems like you might get a lot of immediate result out of just fixing these usability issues.
I notice the missing $179 United fare now shows up. What was up with that? Bug?
FWIW, now that I know how this works (and assuming the price issues are taken care of), I will use himpunk for my next flight.
I booked last minute flight to SFO 2 days before Fluent Conf through Hipmunk. I was glad to get the perfect flight schedule and the whole experience took less than 15 minutes.
Loved the UI, didn't matter even if I ended up paying more.
Maybe I'm spoiled I live near two major airports (Oakland and SFO) and tend to travel to large cities. But I've not found hipmunk's UI innovation to be anything but excess nonsense I don't need.
For one thing, Kayak doesn't let you pick your departure and return legs separately, and instead displays every possible permutation of flights that fit your search criteria. I remember seeing over a thousand "results" for SFO-JFK. How a user is expected to make a decision there... your guess is as good as mine.
The number of "results" explode even further for any flight with possible connections.
Also, the arbitrary filters that one needs to chop the result set down to something mentally digestible are also highly flawed. When I fly is important to me, but if I say, restrict the results to "departs before 11am", it will filter out something that leaves at 11:05am. The more "analog" view of Hipmunk is greatly preferable.
All that said, I'm cautiously hopeful for Hipmunk. I love their UX, but building a business around something that has infamously low margins (like, incredibly, razor thin margins) seems like a questionable strategy. I can see why Hipmunk has expanded into hotel bookings (though IMO it's not very good), but one has to wonder about the viability of its core product.
What is wrong with that :)? Set the threshold to 12PM if the 11:05 flight is OK with you.
Hipmunk confuses me because I have to do the back and forth dance between the two legs to find the price/time optimum point. I can zero in on a solution much faster with Kayak's depart/arrive filters.
But the 11:55am flight is not OK. In any case, this is breaking what users have to do now - they have to purposely break the UI to get the results they need. They have to lie to the system to coerce out the answers they actually want, as opposed to the system being smart about it.
When I say "leave at 11am", I mean "the closer to 11 the better", not "place a hard limit".
Not to mention, Kayak's results display is terrible - the information is densely packed and not in an easily parseable way, making flight comparisons a gigantic chore. If I want to compare my departure times, it stuffs the return trip (which frankly, has no business being there) times right underneath.
It also insists on showing raw time values, without any visual indication of longer flights vs. shorter flights, nor visual indication that differentiates departure/landing times. This is only a couple notches above comparing UNIX timestamps. Manually, consciously subtracting time values is not something people are good at, and certainly humans perform poorly at it when forced to do it many times in short order.
It is, in short, needlessly precise. It doesn't matter if one flight leaves at 6:05am and the other leaves at 6:08am. I don't need that kind of precision in my decision-making process. Nor do I need to know if one flight is 8 minutes longer than the other. It's noise, and it's poor UX.
Nowadays I go out of my way to avoid Kayak - or really anyone who fails to separate the two legs of a trip. It's ugly, it's information overload, and it's downright maddening.
That said, reducing the complexity of the UI for that usecase might be a way to increase adoption.
NB I do a lot of complicated travel, and hipmunk found me a fare that saved me $1800! I use ITA matrix, KVSTool, etc, and oddly enough it didn't show up there.
http://www.hipmunk.com/#!SFO,SJC.BOS,Jul13.Jul22&1,First
As for the multi-dates, when you select a date, you can click the "+/-" buttons to add time to your query. You can also manually add "+-n" to your date to give a range.
So, say I was open to flying out July 12, 13 (original), or 14 - I could update my date to look like: "Jul 13 -+1"
There's a few things in that shot that confuse me, but the top timeline bar is not something I glance at and understand.
http://blog.hipmunk.com/1/post/2010/08/hello-world.html
I can't believe how much the site & company has grown since - it's a testament to the fabulous product and team. Onward & upward!
I just noticed your homepage is starting to get busy. Please don't put too much stuff on it.
I also love what priceline offers, their price negotiator!!! It always hits well below what the prices of airlines currently offer. Any plans to put this in the future of hipmunk?
Basically, I:
- Go to 3-4 engines or portals. Try to figure out all the airline flying that routes. See who flies where.
- Go to the airlines' sites directly, see if they prices are better (usually they are). Try to remember which airlines (RyanAir) never have fares listed on aggregators. Fill out captchas and tick on boxes to be let in.
- See what the prices are for the most expensive leg & try to put together my own route using two separately bought tickets.
- Try to think of some more exotic routes: change airports in London, fly through a Greek resort island, whatever.
- Call a travel agent to see if they can do better.
I might not get all the way down this list.When I do, I rarely see the same fare twice. When I lived in Australia the stakes were higher and I always went down the whole horrible list. I hate doing this. I'd pay good money to avoid it. But, for my use case UI crappiness isn't the issue(even though doing your grocery shopping on Ebay in 1998 would be a better experience). The problem is centralizing all the available fares onto one site.
Slight tangent: You can get these flights (dublin-tel aviv) for around $600-$900 round trip if you're reasonably early and flexible. Why does hipmunk even offer me a $7500 leg that takes 24hr and fly through Toronto? Shouldn't their agony detector realize that no sane person would want this? Isn't good UI also removing useless information? If they want to demonstrate how thorough they are (also important) aren't there easier ways?
I don't mean to be picking on hipmunk. They're obviously dedicated to good user experience and they do a great job of presenting the large amount of information one needs to process in order to book a flight. If any Hipmunk people are reading please take any snarkiness as a cry for help. I really do want a better experience booking flights I'm looking to you guys for them.
That's a terrible experiment, fares almost always go up as you get closer to the departure date. If you want to do that, check the same thing on the airline's own site.
In my experience hipmunk isn't more expensive than any other site. In fact, every site will quote you the same darn price for the same darn flight, because airline fares are a lot more formalized than most people seem to be assuming.
BTW, that's not my experience at all. My experience is every site quotes a completely different price.
Hipmunk does list RyanAir actually http://www.hipmunk.com/#!DUB.LGW,Nov19.Nov24
I figured the original comment here was stating that there are airlines that aren't listed. (Kayak lists AirAsia and Garuda at least though.)
For one comparison that hurts:
http://www.kayak.com/#/flights/BKK-MES/2012-07-08/2012-07-11...
vs:
http://www.hipmunk.com/#!BKK.MES,Jul08.Jul11&3-1
(Although clearly if one were actually going to Sumatra, one would stay for more than 3 days...)
But you don't need to do something exotic like Bangkok <-> Sumatra to see a disparity. Even Bangkok <-> Singapore or Kuala Lumpur show problems.
1. Find cheapest flights between two countries (country->city, city->country, country->country). Some people don't mind traveling a little just to reach the airport from where they can find cheaper flights.
2. Bypass stopovers which levy transit visa. You can easily find my location so you can identify places where I will need to get transit visa even for stopovers and give me option to ignore flights with those stopovers.
You can sort of do this right now with comma-separated airports, like this: http://www.hipmunk.com/#!LHR,LGW.BOS,Next+Month.Next+2+Month...
The only restriction is that the airports must be in the same time zone and there's a cap on how many you can list for a single location (maybe 5?)
why one way flights are often as expensive as round trips, his thoughts on couchsourced flight searching (flightfox.com, current YC batch), their monetization plans, while it is so hard to get the best priced tickets
In my case I search using Kayak, but never really book the ticket from Kayak (don't follow their link to the airline). I go directly to the airline site and book it there. Many people I know do the same. I despise using Orbitz/Priceline other than just a cursory glance to see if there are cheaper tickets. I know that sometimes an itinerary involves multiple airlines and that is when there might be an advantage booking through, say Orbitz, but even in those cases I just book separate tickets.
Why is this free search/booking industry still unsaturated and is there really a demand for such capital infusion?
Update: My question is specific to flight search, because I think hotel search can be profitable model as sometimes these sites provide better rates than the hotel's site.
A lot of people do book from Kayak just because it's easier. So, don't assume you are the typical customer here. Also, I am not familiar with Hipmunk's numbers but I believe that hotel search is the real revenue generator for these sites, and flight search just acts to get people in the door.
If as you say the hotel search is the real deal, it makes sense. Which leads me to the next thought, wonder why hotels haven't caught up with the airline industry in having a fairly realistic price listing on their own site? In fact, most of the times I am ok just booking using priceline bidding for hotels.
What do you mean? Most hotels nowadays give you exactly the same price on their site as you'd get from orbitz/expedia/hipmunk.
If you mean a price list rather than a get-a-quote-for-a-particular-day, then that's not in their interests (they don't really want you to know how much they're gouging you on busy nights), but it's been a fair while since I stayed in a hotel which didn't have a price search thing on their site.
Priceline and hotwire are, of course, always cheaper than getting a named hotel, if you're clever about it.
I have to say, though, if hotel search is the real cash cow (as I suspect it is) then I think hipmunk should spend some more time working on it. Their interface for flight search is the greatest, and I use it all the time. But the hotel search I find to be confusing and clunky so I rarely use it.
I fly mainly International.
update: would be nice to know when you guys closed this...someone says it was a while ago?