Travel Search Site Hipmunk (YC S10) Cuts Yahoo Deal
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
It does immensely suck that you leave Hipmunk to actually buy the tickets. I had to redo my entire search and purchase because the Safari view of Delta's website in the ipad Hipmunk app crashed.
I also had to recently buy my cross-country Christmas tickets through Expedia. For whatever reason Expedia had far, far better selection and prices. Usually Hipmunk is great but in this case it wasn't even close. That's definitely made me slightly wary of it for the future.
All things said it's great. Can't wait to see where it is in a few more years.
I'd use Hipmunk more often if they actually fulfilled their functionality promise as an aggregator. A pretty UI isn't enough.
(source: was a Skyscanner employee for a bit.)
Sometimes there is an explanation (e.g. the flight doesn't exist, or has a 30hr layover), and other times we don't have the flight, in which case we want to alert our providers to fix it.
But when I clicked on the button to book, the price was different (higher) on the airline website.
- Consolidators [that you don't have commercial relationships with] have wholesale arrangements with airlines allowing them to sell tickets below the direct/GDS price. I suspect you're more reliant on ITA results than many other portals or meta-search sites and their prices are trivially easy to beat on competitive routes if you have a broader range of partnerships.
- Some consolidators put together logical itineraries not bookable via GDS or even direct with the airline. As an extreme example I once bought a cheap, logical pair of connecting long haul flights with Saudia via eBookers that Saudia's website wouldn't allow me to book at any price direct with them; I'd guess the airline didn't want to market anything involving a 5 hour layover in an under-redevelopment terminal in Riyadh. There are plenty of less glaringly obvious potential indirect itineraries that consolidators (potentially including Kayak as well as their affiliates) can identify with Innovata's minimum connect time file and schedule data[1] and other providers might have a more liberal view on reasonable connections than ITA
- Sometimes other sites' metasearch results' advantages are purely illusory, based on outdated results they've cached or screenscraped. I find Skyscanner LCC prices are frequently out of date, even though the actual ticket price is also usually cheaper than ITA's. Other sites might also create the appearance of more choice by not combining codeshared flights into one.
As for LON-SYD on Monday Kayak has a lot more results under $1000 than you. It's possible their much cheaper ticket prices with SIA are outdated or geolocation specific, but the cheapest flight they show (a Garuda two-stopper that's no more obviously agonising than your cheapest result but 10% cheaper) doesn't show on your engine at all. Then again, the price with Kayak had risen to only 5% cheaper than your best price when I started the booking process...
[1]disclosure: I sell that data, amongst many other things, although not to OTAs
Every time I've booked a flight in the past couple years, I've gone to Hipmunk to check schedules. Out of the 10 or so flights I've taken, Hipmunk always provided the same prices flights that were important (cheapest/most convenient for me), but I can't say I bothered to look for things that weren't convenient. These were always major airport to major airport things in the US, however.
> Mr. Goldstein would not discuss specific financial terms of the company’s deals with Yahoo and Yelp, but said they would participate in the benefits Hipmunk received — commissions, usually — when one of its users booked a flight or hotel through a travel partner.
Hipmunk's position in such a competitive market is not enviable.
These types of revenue sharing deals often look very attractive on paper because they don't require much if any capital, but they can be disastrous and far more costly in the long run. In a good outcome, you frequently end up with a handful of partners who drive most of your business, effectively own many of the customers they send you, and have a permanent claim on a substantial portion of your margin.
Put simply, these deals tend to defer the hard costs associated with customer acquisition but also drive them up.
The other factor that I feel doesn't get brought up enough is the attribution piece. How much did they REALLY contribute to bringing a customer vs. all your other marketing efforts, brand awareness that has built up over time, etc.?
In the worst cases, some partners can just be parasitic and leech off bottom of the funnel traffic to maximize their return and minimize their risk. The trick is finding the right balance between all those efforts which requires data, flexibility, and trust between all parties in the relationship.
Now that they have set a precedent, Lyria and the likes opened their booking plateforms to Capitaine.
But, still, you get odd looks if you try to exchange a CT ticket at a counter "how, that's a travel agent ticket, we don't support those" "well, yes you do, just type this booking number and you'll be able to deliver me another ticket, trust me" ;-)
At best sites like this are booking sites for xyz but I have a heard time reconciling the appropriateness of "travel search"
What am I missing?
Things like local transportation info/getting around, what to do, where to party, safety info, visa info - and on and on.
To me "travel search" implies everything to do with travel including destination research and more. So whether it's metasearch or OTAs - ultimately the focus is on booking something (is that a correct statement to make?)
To me travel - and certainly travel search should mean more than that