Why Hipmunk Is The World's Best Travel Site | Hacker News Reader

Why Hipmunk Is The World's Best Travel Site

forbes.com

63 pointskreutz54 comments

I like the idea behind Hipmunk, but it doesn't really work with how I personally pick travel.

I generally have an airline in mind first. If I want to fly to Seattle, I basically know my choices are VX, UA, AK. If I want to fly to Hong Kong, I'll try hard to be on CX, or failing that, SQ, or UA (to use the eBayed SWU to be in business for +$300 over cheap coach). To Kuwait, UA or LH.

Alternatively, I want to know "when will flights to (exotic destination) be cheap" -- the best choice for that is still Kayak. Flyer Talk is also a good source of information, because when an airline runs a 3x miles qualifying special, a $500 transpac costs about $0 if you value the miles to hit a tier.

If I need to fly at specific times, it's usually bounded on one side -- get from point A to point B either leaving as late as possible or arriving as early as possible. Longer layovers aren't a big deal, so it's search for the relevant time first, then optimize.

For hotels, it's the same thing -- I know of a specific hotel I want to use (Pen or MO or one of the good SPG properties in BKK), or I'm trying to maximize SPG status/points and shop Starwood, or want to find something as cheap/deal as possible (usually Vegas). Couch-of-friend or AirBnB also come in, especially if the preliminary hotel search fails. I rarely care where in a city I'm staying as much as the property itself.

There clearly is something better than the current travel sites, but for me, Hipmunk isn't it (yet).

> I generally have an airline in mind first

Isn't the point of the flight search sites to list all/most of the options that do a given trip, so you don't have to think about the details of which airlines fly where?

(This is assuming there aren't other reasons, like rewards programs with specific airlines or safety concerns.)

There are lots of prices not in GDSes, so they won't appear on Hipmunk. :(

Welcome to being an outlier.

Yep, my guess is that people who instantly grok

> when an airline runs a 3x miles qualifying special, a $500 transpac costs about $0 if you value the miles to hit a tier.

Are a small percentage of people who fly. Of course, they probably spend a lot of money flying, so are worth their own sites, but they're likely a different target.

I think most people who fly live in crappy underserved markets with a single airline, so there's really only one choice anyway. The people with discretion are in multi-airline hubs (or within driving distance of multiple), or flying international routes (where anyone who does it frequently probably does have strong preferences).

The tool I want is ITA/GFS + certain Sabre features + Kayak + Tripit + Flyertalk, all rolled in one. Would be appealing to a few hundred thousand (or maybe a few million) flyers, but people who fly a lot, and often in premium cabins; 10-100x more flight dollars, maybe 10x more flight miles, than the infrequent holiday market.

If I were trying to get into this market I'd try to find something I could sell to United 1Ks and AA ExPlats. I'll take ten of them over 100 leisure flyers.

That market, however, is probably booking directly through their respective airlines or a corporate TA. Makes it tough to break into.

Not always; there are a lot of the hardcore travelers who hate their corp TA, and who want to maintain status with 2+ airlines. Add in hotels, and there's a market.

Especially if you fly international a lot -- the foreign airlines are usually pretty bad at handling principals who make their own travel reservations, and most of the <40yo tech/law/etc. professionals who have to travel a lot prefer doing their own arrangements (with help) to blindly trusting someone else.

There's also a market for people who fly a huge amount but are cheap and micro-optimizers. Not enough $ to get United Global Services, but 1K, and 1K doesn't actually help much except at the airport (and clearing waitlists).

The other market might be lazy/late optimization. i.e. passively looking at your travel patterns, and if I see you fly in J/F SFO-IAD-KWI once a month for 6 months, proactively negotiating a rate with UA for you to do so at a discount in the future. That's not something UA will offer, but something a company or group could push for based on observed travel, especially if they can present LH as a credible alternative.

Hear this guy.

The hole purpose of being the best tool is to expose the effectiveness of the insider to the regular folk.

If anyone thinks "the best travel search" shouldn't do all this guy says and more, then go back to using aol or something

Hipmunk has the best interface of any travel site, and displays the same information in a easily understandable page than other sites take 15 pages to do so - but I've always been able to find cheaper prices elsewhere. Sometimes much cheaper!

If the pricing isn't right, than it's algorithims get thrown of to, so some flights which are better and cheaper aren't even displayed as it will have instead display some other flight which Hipmunk for some reason thinks is cheaper and so displays that instead.

The hipmunk interface is light years ahead of everyone else in terms of displaying information - but flights and pricing - not so much. I wish it was though, as I hate booking through sites like expedia where you have to fill out 15 gazillion things each time and it's a pain to compare different flights.

I don't doubt the sincerity of his own fondness of the site, but I still don't see why people continue to pretend that travel search is a pain point. Am I the only one who has no problem understanding travel search on Kayak and Bing? Travel search is a solved problem.

The unsolved part of the problem is that not every airline allows their flights to be shown on these aggregating sites, which is a legal problem, not a technical problem.

The travel market is huge and air search is still very fragmented with a lot of the low cost carriers (Southwest, Ryanair, etc.) not participating in metasearch engines. The most recent user research on travel planning/purchasing still shows most users visiting 6+ sites and spending a lot of time comparing prices, checking options, etc. so I think a lot of startups want to find a way to simplify the process. The problem with air though is the margins are low and outside of the UI, there's very few ways you can innovate with someone else's inventory.

At Room 77, we're exclusively focused on hotel search. This is also a market that's highly fragmented from a pricing/distribution perspective. You can get widely different pricing options for the same room at a hotel based on whether or not you're buying through the right channel. Sometimes, those channels are only accessible to travel agents or to wholesalers and other times the standard online travel agencies have the best price. We're aggregating every channel we can tap to find the best prices. Most people also don't realize that hotels discount for a lot of special groups like seniors, aaa members, military members, and government workers and those are not easily searchable today and we're starting to expose those in our search.

Of course, we've got a lot of work to do to simplify the UI and the search experience and would love to hear about any pain points you have when you're doing hotel search that we can solve.

Roger (ex-Farecast/Bing Travel, now Room 77)

There's not a whole lot can be done about fragmentation in search results for airlines that don't want to participate in comparison sites. The only way to fix that is for the airlines themselves to make the decision to change, and Southwest doesn't really have much to gain by doing so because they have a reputation for being a discout carrier despite having fares that are usually more expensive than many other major carriers. Same thing with Spirit Air. I usually maintain a short list of airlines that I know don't show up on travel sites and perform separate searches. Not the easiest thing in the world, but certainly not what I would consider a major pain point in my day.

In any case I don't see how Hipmunk eases that process at all. To me it is just a different view setting for a typical search site, which seems more like a feature than a game-changing business. Maybe I'm wrong, but I've tried searching the site a couple times but went back to using Bing and Kayak because I think they offer the best travel search that I've seen. I don't have anything against the site or its founders, I just have a hard time believing articles like this that rave about how much better the process is. I just don't see it, and based upon what others have written I think a lot would agree. It's not about being a naysayer, I just like to try to keep an objective viewpoint regardless of who is behind the business. If I thought it was an awesome service, I would certainly give it it's due.

Travel search will be a problem for me once I don't have to call each airline individually to get the best ticket prices for my two-year old. Discounts for children exist, but they vary based on airports, airlines, ticket type, and most airlines specifically only make them available through their hotlines. That is a pain point that needs to be solved, but it's not something that a pretty UI can do.

I've tried Hipmunk several times because I feel like I should like it, and though I agree it has some great UI elements, I've never found a flight I've wanted through it. It just amazes me that it's still so hard to get quick and decent-enough results with semi-ambiguous depart/arrival dates. Though it's not perfect, Adioso.com i would say is the best flight search site I've seen for this (and find myself constantly going back to it because of this particular feature). It very quickly accepts ambiguous search terms, then quickly displays a nice price graph. As soon as I select a depart date, it jumps me to the return date price graph (if it's a return trip), and I'm done.

I just tried the price graph feature in Hipmunk, and I set my "outbound date" easily enough, but I can't for the life of me find how to choose my inbound flights?!

Edit: I just figured it out. I need to click on the plus to the right of the # of days selection to add +- days to consider. I'm not entirely sure this is intuitive or necessary?

I love Hipmunks interface, but it usually fails at finding the cheapest available price.

I've used flightfox.com, a crowd sourced flight finding service, a few times and I've been surprisingly impressed each time. The guys on that site have found me some incredibly cheap flights that I have no idea at all how they found. I've saved a ton of money using it.

It's great to pay someone a small amount of money to handle the pain in the ass that searching for flights is.

Flightfox is pretty awesome, but they're generally for more complicated itineraries that require searching over lots of different variables (e.g. dates, layover, multiple stops, etc.). Hipmunk I've found is great for finding that quick flight from BOS<->SFO on dates I'm certain about. I imagine Hipmunk may expend the kind of usage cases they're optimized for as they grow.

> George Orwell said journalism is “printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.”

Orwell? I'm pretty sure it was Lord Northcliffe (founder of the Daily Mail in late 19th century) who said "News is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising."

Yeah, it wasn't Orwell. It just hopped into Orwell's orbit because he has the greater mass. Quotes get acquired by market leaders over time.

Why do I say it wasn't Orwell? Because https://www.google.com/search?q=everything+else+is+public+re... produces no source, just a plethora of (extremely recent) attributions. Similarly with Google Book Search. If you go back to 2003 you can see variants of the quote being attributed to David Brinkley (http://books.google.com/books?ei=5WjvT-6JKsrgqAGi9cCFBA&...). Changing wording is a tell-tale sign of misattribution, by the way, because when quotes are severed from any canonical text they become free to evolve.

Probably the OP got the misquote from goodreads.com because that's the top result Google gives for it, and the OP links to the goodreads.com entry for Orwell (though not to the quote).

There are many more and much older citations for the Northcliffe quote you mention, though the original source is apparently lost in time, or at least lost to 5 minutes of googling.

I find it interesting that the quote hopped to Orwell instead of to Rupert Murdoch. Almost by definition, there are only a few possibilities for any hop. Murdoch is the natural inheritor of the social category (press baron) but Orwell is the more natural heir to the content. But by being attributed to Orwell, the quote acquires an ethical connotation it didn't have before. Now it's of a piece with "speaking truth to power" and "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable" (http://mikeswritingworkshop.blogspot.com/2010/03/comfort-aff...), which I doubt Lord Northcliffe would have endorsed as his mission.

That's probably also why "advertising" flipped to "public relations" in the phrasing. Advertising is legitimate in a newspaper while public relations is sinister. So these things undergo semantic hops as well.

This would be a good one to email to the masked detective at http://quoteinvestigator.com/about/.

Thanks for this investigation! What I like about the Northcliffe attribution is that the guy was not a saint; he practically invented tabloïds. That lends a very practical aspect to the quote -- secrets sell.

Journalists are not fighting holy wars, they are printing secrets, and that's what makes them good journalists. People who print things "that nobody wants to suppress" aren't journalists. They're more like... "useful idiots"?

Now the problem with the OP is that his post has absolutely nothing to do with good or bad journalism; it's precisely a PR stunt for Hipmunk, which I certainly don't object to (AFAIK Hipmunk is a very fine service); I object to the fact of calling that piece "journalism" -- and invoking Orwell on top of it!!

Bing Travel: http://www.bing.com/travel/ (aka FareCast) is my personal favorite.

Their price predictor for certain routes is quite accurate.

Ever used momondo.com? Love the site - it's the first app I look up these days.

Thanks for the link. I often don't care if I arrive a day earlier or later, and the quick day switching is something I miss in Hipmunk. Kayak is alright, but momondo seems to do an even better job.

Do check the list of sites they search: http://www.momondo.com/we-search/ I don't remember how I stumbled upon these guys, but generally their flight results are the cheapest. They don't do too well in hotels (I tried US ones) though.

Hipmunk serves a niche within the industry by providing travel and flight info in a unique way, and they do it well. As the story notes, they won't necessarily find the cheapest flight or present the most flight options. I think it is a good case study of a service succeeding in a narrow segment as opposed to trying to be the end-all, be-all provider.

The comments here are more negative than I expected (because my sense is there is a lot of positive Hipmunk love/hype/PR going around and it is a YC darling). Anyway, just an observation. I too have tried to use HM at travel booking time and so far have never found or booked a flight through it.

Or because it's a bought article. Forbes has zero integrity and I wouldn't doubt for a second there's some sort of back-scratching/kickback/payola situation going on here.

And because, quite frankly, Hipmunk just isn't that good.

If you have a source for this I'd love to see it. The only unethical behavior I've seen at a major publication was at the WSJ, and there it wasn't payola. They have writers who blatantly distort the facts, manufacture quotes, and screw people by "forgetting" that something was off the record if it fits their spin.

Only thing I can think of that comes close is some of the trade press for industries that are dominated by a few big players. Trade press often are getting a huge percentage of their print ad revenues (and sponsorship dollars for conferences) from one or two companies, and will bend over backwards to avoid criticizing them. They'll also do slam pieces on upstart companies. But there's no explicit agreement going on, they just know where their bread is buttered.

The winners from here on out will the ones who make the Web functional and simple.

On a site with lots of ads (including a popup ad), social media "sharing links", a sidebar with unrelated content, and persistent top- and bottom bars.

I'd like to recommend Dohop (http://www.dohop.com). We try our best to not only get the cheapest prices but to also display the complete price, that is, including potential credit-card fees, booking fees etc.

We also have a nice affiliate-service where you can set up your own Dohop-powered flight-search engine on your site and customize it to your liking. (http://whitelabel.dohop.com/)

Dislaimer: I work for Dohop (if you hadn't already guessed it).

Hipmunk has a great interface but is totally unusable for one reason: they don't list all flights.

This may have changed since the last time I checked (within the past year), but Kayak would list many more flights than Hipmunk would. Until they have data for ALL flights, what's the point?

Kayak is pretty awesome. The one feature I'd like them to add is a filter for flight duration. I can -sort- by duration, but I can't tell it to just ignore 15+ hour journeys when it's showing me ~8 hour journeys.

As a hacker, for me, the best airline search website would be something that presents all available flights as a gigantic SQL table (or set of tables) so I could just type in a SQL query:

select * from allflights f where start = 'London' and end = 'Chicago' and roundtrip = true and airline in ('American', 'Virgin') etc.

What did PG say? Build something that 10,000 hackers would use and everyone else would come screaming in.

You want ITA Matrix:

http://matrix.itasoftware.com/

They have an incredibly powerful query language called QPX. Your search would be as follows:

  LHR VS,AA ORD (nonstop)
  LHR VS,AA+ ORD (zero or more stops)
  LHR VS,AA NYC,IAD ORD (with at least one stopover in any NYC airport or at Dulles)
  LHR VS NYC AA ORD,MDW (Virgin to NYC, American to ORD or Midway)
  LHR F+ ~IAD ORD (any number of legs, but don't stopover at Dulles)
  LHR VS ORD / f bc=J|bc=W (nonstop on Virgin in full-fare  business class or premium economy)

You can get even more complicated by specifying booking classes, operating airline, specific flight numbers, etc. All this, and it gives you the same time-bar interface as Hipmunk (it's where they got the idea, in fact) which is a fantastic way of visualizing the length of flights, stopovers, different airlines, etc.

For someone who travels a lot (like me) it's indispensable.

The only caveat for me (and this applies to all US-based travel search engines) is the lack of data from low-cost carriers (Southwest, AirAsia, etc) and only Y (full-fare) fare data for many Asian carriers.

And we (Hipmunk) support the first 4 of those too. Just type two colons after your city code. :)

would be great to add that to yql :)

For me there's Southwest, and everything else that's usually much more expensive. So I won't be using Hipmunk much for air. I also find Southwest's interface to be excellent. I really like Hipmunk's hotel search.

The fact is that Hipmunk is oriented for people searching shorts travels (cabotage) meanwhile the competence (AKA Kayak, Expedia, etc) offers best options for longs travel (for example, for holidays).

Proof that kitsch can get you pretty far. But it's time for this site to start refining the visuals a bit.

I count seven different font sizes on the home page alone.

What's even more incredible is that their IOS app is more useable than the regular website.

It's too bad it takes 15 seconds to perform each search...

Ever tried Google flight search? Instant.

True, but Hipmunk searches all airlines almost all over the world, and allows all destinations all over the world. 15 seconds is not a lot when comparing it to other flight planning websites.

It does search world-wide, but not very well.

I happen to be booking a flight today, so tried it.

I need a flight from Quimpere (France) to London (City Airport). Expedia brings up the usual suspects, and I chose a direct British Airways flight for ~£100.

Hipmunk comes up with a single result - an American Airlines flight via Orly (Paris) for over $800.

Yes, noticed the same thing. For a site to be called "World's best travel site" it needs to work all around the world and not only in the US.

It's not even close to the world's best travel site. I've looked at it before - maybe it's good in America but outside the results are bizarre.

I̶ ̶j̶u̶s̶t̶ ̶t̶r̶i̶e̶d̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶a̶g̶a̶i̶n̶ ̶-̶ ̶S̶y̶d̶n̶e̶y̶ ̶(̶S̶Y̶D̶)̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶S̶a̶p̶p̶o̶r̶o̶ ̶(̶C̶T̶S̶)̶ ̶m̶i̶d̶ ̶s̶e̶p̶t̶e̶m̶b̶e̶r̶.̶ ̶J̶u̶s̶t̶ ̶g̶o̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶q̶a̶n̶t̶a̶s̶.̶c̶o̶m̶ ̶d̶i̶r̶e̶c̶t̶l̶y̶ ̶g̶i̶v̶e̶s̶ ̶m̶e̶ ̶~̶$̶1̶1̶0̶0̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶t̶u̶r̶n̶ ̶f̶l̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ ̶-̶ ̶h̶i̶p̶m̶u̶n̶k̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶d̶o̶ ̶b̶e̶t̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶n̶ ̶~̶$̶1̶3̶5̶0̶.̶ ̶G̶r̶e̶a̶t̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶r̶t̶.̶ (edited - prices have changed since yesterday and my criticism is no longer valid)

OK, so I am thinking of going over to the old country, SYD-LHR mid october. That's a long flight, I want at least premium economy - wtf, I can't even specify that on hipmunk! Well, that search is over even before it begun. I am sorry but a travel site that doesn't know what premium economy is is literally useless.

I don't want to sound like a dick. This stuff must be hard. But World's Best Travel Site? Are you kidding? How about learning "chopsticks" before you claim you're the greatest pianist in history?

(edit - the sapporo price changed under me in the last few hours, rendering my comment pretty void, right now at least. What I said about no prem econ stands, though. I'm a tall guy, and I'll flat-out refuse an economy flight more than 8 hours. Business is very expensive if I'm on my own money. Premium economy is a lifesaver to me. It needs to be on the site, yesterday)

For the SYD-CTS comparison, does the quantas.com price include all taxes and fees, the way Hipmunk does?

Actually, it seems a sale or something just ended and the qantas.com price is back up to 1800!

I'll edit to remove that.

But yeah, all Australian sites have to state the fully loaded cost. I can't stand sites that don't do that..

I loved this deep-rooted aspect of Australian (and, uh, New Zealic) culture when I visited your part of the world. Hotel advertises "$129 / night"? That's exactly the amount that gets charged to your credit card.

I find Hipmunk's look unintuitive, but I can't speak to the prices because I don't use it anymore.

I'm not sure if I'm the only one who finds their UI confusing as hell.

it doesnt confuse me per se, it just values some things i dont care about. i dont need 80% screen devoted to when the flights are and how long there are. i only fly nonstop and pretty much dont care what time of day it is unless its really early or redeye.

Hipmunk is good but not the best. Price and choice is still a huge factor for many consumers and Hipmunk still falls short on that front many a time.

Each aggregator has it's own unique advantages which have to be considered... Google is super fast with amazing flexible fare options, Kayak often finds amazing hacker fares and Bing's price predictions are very valuable. Combined they would make a formidable site...

Is there a solution? we believe there is... - www.Cheapflightsfinder.com is a new site that allows you to compare all of them - Hipmunk, Kayak, Google flights, Bing and many more in seconds - we call it meta-meta search and in our opinion it is the best way to make the most powerful search of all... Try it out - we think you will be glad you did.

Shah Sid (CEO - Cheapflightsfinder.com)

Where is talk about www.skyscanner.com? What is better?

Perform entire month or year searches, choose things like ANY NYC or EVERYWHERE as a destination or departure.

I have saved hundreds on EVERYWHERE searches. If you can just get into a region like Europe or South East Asia then you can take advantage of their cheap rail systems andor internal flights.

The interface has cluttered over its evolution but it still runs better than Hipmunk on a low resource box andor low bandwidth.

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