Hipmunk Launches Flight Deals | Hacker News Reader

Hipmunk Launches Flight Deals

hipmunk.com

64 pointsmikegreenspan36 comments

Hmm it offered me a flight from Oakland to Vegas for $88. I clicked through and saw this: "The price we showed you earlier for this search is no longer available. We apologize for the inconvenience. " and lowest price was $108. :(

Edit: I tried again with different dates and was able to find a flight for $88. So guess it just needs some fine tuning.

saw the same thing

so you're suggesting a HN meetup in vegas? :-)

I expect that the utility of this drops as more people use it - if a bunch of people get a notification about a cheap flight, and there are only two seats at that price, most people are going to be unhappy.

Flight prices change really fast so its possible the flight price actually changed in the time they checked for the deal and the time you clicked through

I'm not sure why this is news. (I'm not being sarcastic -- just curious if/how this is different from the million existing from-your-city flight deal notification sites.)

Because those sites don't show interesting deals. theflightdeal.com uses a .06/mile metric which only shows amazing deals (ie. $400 to Hawaii from NYC). I assume Hipmunk is doing something similar.

Kayak does this too, and even Travelocity did it a while back (although their version may have been killed). There are other sites as well than use a similar (or identical) metric.

Why do you think these features haven't taken off (that's an assumption)? Maybe it's the map format? I've really enjoyed the curated approach that theflightdeal has taken and now hipmunk. As I said in another comment, I wish Kayak let you filter by cost per mile. The really great deals get lost in all the other deals.

i love kayak.com/explore lets you think "where can i go for X$"?

If.you're a fan of Kayak explore you might find http://tripcommon.com interesting - essentially aggregating deals like that but for multiple people coming from different origins

Hmmm, the campaign has San Francisco in the URL referral link. Why not pre-pop the correct city based on my IP Address? You'd get a better conversion rate if it said deals in New York City, where I live, rather than deals flying from San Francisco. I know Hacker News has a sizeable following in SF, but still.

Oops, Hipmunk does IP tracking in the email, but I pasted in a link that was prepopulated for San Francisco. Sorry about that :)

No problem, just making sure this doesn't happen everywhere :)

Eh? Do you think the folks at Linode would be willing to load my server onto a plane so it could come visit me with this round trip ticket from Houston that I'm supposedly very eager to purchase?

Your guys should do something about your ads on Reddit.

I think those are making people annoyed with the service.

Not affiliated with Hipmunk at all, but can you elaborate why you think that?

Love it. It would be nice to be able to subscribe to certain specific time frames, e.g., over the weekend; it's much easier to impulsively travel then while holding down a traditional full-time position. Nevertheless, subscribed!

As someone in a long distance relationship, it would be awesome to be able to visit my SO over a weekend spontaneously if the flight price were below a certain threshold. I currently have to manually search Kayak which is a bit suboptimal.

Equally awesome would be the ability to query something like "Show me all round trips in the next three months that take off Friday at 8 and return Sunday at 8, and that are below 100$ for this destination". I haven't been able to find this kind of feature yet, and it looks like a simple MySQL query.

Adioso does this. Inside the company we actually call it the long-distance relationship query.

http://adioso.com/us/nyc-to-omaha-nebraska-in-march-any-frid...

From your suggested query, we're just missing time-of-day and wider timeframes than just a month, but we're close.

The reason it's not a simple MySQL query is that most flight search sites don't have all the flights from all the airlines on all the dates pre-cached in a local database.

This is actually more interesting then hipmunk, but kind of not as easy to use as their service. Maybe you could just do a simple page like they did to query your service. And filter god-damn Spirit, they should not be called an airline!

How about this?

http://adioso.com/us/san-francisco-to-domestic-return-5-to-1...

http://adioso.com/us/san-francisco-to-international-return-5...

http://adioso.com/us/san-francisco-to-western-europe-return-...

Also, you can filter out any airline - just hover over the icon and click "Hide [airline name] flights".

Yeah, that's it, thanks for demonstration :)

This is awesome and incredible when I hit "watch price" it says:

Ensure this value has at most 100 characters (it has 103).

My email is not very long... its 8 characters + @gmail.com

EDIT: I like to fly back to see my family in Los Angeles and I was finding across the board better prices at hipmunk.

Thanks for pointing this out.

The value-too-long error was actually relating to the search query; a silly bug we've never noticed before.

Regarding fares - we're at the mercy of the agencies and airlines whose inventory we can access, and sometimes it will be the cheapest and sometimes it won't, but ultimately we're trying to establish connections with enough agencies/suppliers that wherever the cheapest fare happens to be, you can find it via our site. It's a big job, but we're getting there.

I really really like the fact you are using natural language to try and simplify these kinds of queries. However, your service appears to be quite buggy.

http://adioso.com/fi/helsinki-fi-to-birmingham-uk-between-ma...

- If there is a 1 stop filter, it covers the top of the page - On this search result, I cannot advance more than one calendar month. - Where do I sort by the cheapest flight?

Are you only writing queries on top of expedia? If not why does it say "Loading expedia calendar" at the top.

You could also try just launched http://www.tripcommon.com to see if there is some romantic destination for you to meet up.

They search prices from both departures and then collate to find the few destinations that are cheap for you both.

keep an eye on http://gosillk.com - all your travel wishes will soon come true.

This is huge. http://www.theflightdeal.com/ has been quietly doing it for a year and it's awesome. I'd buy stock if I could.

Kayak has also done something similar at http://kayak.com/explore since 2010.

You're right. I hadn't looked at that in a while. They are capturing the same deals but for me they got lost in all the other less exciting deals. It would be great if you could filter by cost per mile.

It seems to be us only :(

We do something similar for our Explore feature on MileWise, just our deals include prices in reward points. We compare current prices to historical trends to figure out if a price is a "good" option. I like Hipmunk's idea of Subscribing to specific deal feeds.

Would love feedback: http://milewise.com/mw#explore

I find airfarewatchdog.com much better. Usually get alerts and able to find deal price as quoted. If you have flexibility in dates, these services are pretty good.

Not so great, most deals listed are lowest price, which is always Spirit Airlines, this is not the real price you pay most of the time, and after experience flying with them, honestly I wouldn't use them ever again. If they can filter them out, this would be interesting service.

For domestic flights, I filter out all airlines that depart from Denver except for four. Not the best interface for me either.

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