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Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one that thinks "Ugh, not making money yet"?

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.

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> 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.

The problem is twofold:

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.

Are they actually higher though? I found the same thing you did, except when I tried checking out of the other places I found they would place fees on top of things. Turns out Hipmonk just adds those fees in from the start. In my experience they end up coming out the same.

> every time I tried hipmonk, the prices were higher than what I found elsewhere

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

You have many different types of customers, don't worry...

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.

I think I'm in the minority but I can't stand Hipmunk's UI. With Kayak I just put in when I'm going, time of day I want to leave and hit the nonstop button. Then I get a nice ordered list by price boom done.

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.

You're right that the hipmunk UI may be overkill for your use-case of simple point-to-point flights, but I wonder how much of the market that represents?

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.

I'm the opposite, I absolutely despise Kayak's UI and how it explodes for anything but the simplest itineraries (and even then it's a pain).

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.

> but if I say, restrict the results to "departs before 11am", it will filter out something that leaves at 11:05am.

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.

> "Set the threshold to 12PM if the 11:05 flight is OK with you"

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.

Wow all things you've listed is what I love about Kayak. It is fascinating that a simple task such as flight search can lead to such fragmented user preferences.

I wasn't aware of this; you may want to think about how you can better communicate this to your users.

Actually, most aggregators that I've used (hotwire, priceline, etc) all include taxes and fees so I'm not sure what you're referring to here.

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.

Where are the same places that most everyone gets their data from?

Actually, I just tried something today. I was looking for fares to the SF Bay area (OAK, SFO or SJC) and Kayak found fares(with taxes) that were 30 dollars cheaper. Flexible search isn't easy with the current Hipmunk UI.

One thing that Kayak is doing better than Hipmunk is multi-airport things. I.e. We have here in Silicon Valley SFO and SJC. I usually prefer SJC, but can fly from SFO too. Some flights are cheaper or have less connections if you depart from SJC but arrive to SFO, or vice versa. I couldn't find how to tell Hipmunk that it is OK (or not OK) to use different airports for round-trip. Kayak does it very nicely. It also seems pretty hard to say "I like these dates but wouldn't mind to go day earlier-later if that gets me couple of hundreds of dollars back".

When I search for flights home (Boston) from Santa Clara, I usually do a search for "SFO,SJC" to "BOS". This shows me all flights from SFO and SJC to BOS allowing me to pick and choose which flights work for me (time wise) as well as what makes the most sense price wise.

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"

http://www.hipmunk.com/#!SFO,SJC.BOS,Jul13pm1.Jul22&1,Fi...

People expect the before taxes fee, because most seem to do this. Yesterday I booked a hotel on Orbitz via Hipmunk (I like the map view btw). There was roughly $10 price difference, i.e. Hipmunk was showing $X but after clicking on the link, on the Orbitz site it was showing $X-$10. It's a nice surprise, but I wonder how many didn't bother to check...

I'd note that I find Hipmunk weird and non-intuitive. Here's an example: http://cl.ly/3o2Y0z0w0a1l3c3d1X3G

There's a few things in that shot that confuse me, but the top timeline bar is not something I glance at and understand.

Here is an example: One-way flight SFO -> LEX (sadly relevant to my interests) somewhere around August 20.

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.

> Hipmonk allows +2 days for a total of 3 possible. Kayak searches +/- 3 days, for a total of 7.

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.

Actually you can change that text field to say "+-3".

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.

Are you sure? I originally thought the same thing but Hipmunk simply includes all the taxes and fees in the price they display, so it almost always ends up the same for me when checking out.

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