

Hipmunk Surfacing New $6 Million Round - jazzychad
http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/25/hipmunk-funding/

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johnrob
Given the hype growing around Hipmunk, I'm surprised that none of the current
players (i.e. kayak) have responded. Hipmunk's main innovation is the UI - if
you were Kayak, and you already had a backend in place, wouldn't you assign at
least one designer/developer to play around with novel UIs? Maybe launch a
site on a different domain that can act as an R&D and marketing testbed for a
new type of search engine?

It astounds me how lazy these companies appear to be (from the outside of
course). A new hot startup launches, and they don't even lift a finger as a
counter measure. Even when the upstart has proven that there is more to be
desired out of a typical airline search site.

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patio11
Large corporations are physically incapable of doing that (most of them,
anyway). Who does the lone designer report to? Who gets him integration
support from dev and ops? Who has to jump out a window when he clocks the
upgrade that VP Marketing spent $400 million on last year because he liked the
color scheme? (Hint: highly unlikely to be VP Marketing.)

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phil
Yeah, but come on -- we're talking about Kayak here, not General Motors or
something. They're only 6 years old themselves!

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markessien
This is just my subjective opinion, but that seems a bit overvalued to me. I
have no doubt that hipmunk will be successful, but after raising that amount,
the amount of success they must see is going to have to be pretty large. If
they had not raised that amount, a 10 mill exit would be great. But if you
raise 7 and exit for 10, it doesn't look very impressive.

I hope they gain the technological or businesses assets to make them worth
tens of millions, it seems like that is what would guarantee such a large
raise.

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antonioe
I think I've booked at least 10 flights thru Hipmunk. Much easier system for
the business traveler to understand and plan.

$7mil in this market for seasoned entrepenuers with a product making over 100k
a month (their numbers via recent interviews)... not a bad business to invest
in.

Let's see how they scale.

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spez
10 flights?!? Email alexis@hipmunk.com and demand swag.

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vijayr
If you choose the return date earlier than the departure date, the error
message you get

"we don't support trips to the past yet"

humor is always nice :)

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pmchiu
Congrats to the folks at Hipmunk. I've always really liked the simplicity of
this idea for travel search.

I do wonder, however, how long they'll be able to continue to link directly to
the airlines. I'm assuming (and this may be an overly broad generalization)
that as they build out features for users this will naturally force them to
create interstitial's between the carrier's website and their own. I seem to
recall that Kayak was very similar in terms of its relationship with carriers
when they initially started. But as they built out more functionality they
created more for the user to do on their site distracting them away from the
carrier site.

So although TechCrunch thinks it interesting that American isn't cutting out
Hipmunk is this really going to be true in the long run?

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kin
I think so, for financial reasons. AA cut themselves out to cut costs. Orbitz
and other similar services were (from what I heard) overcharging AA for
referral costs. Naturally, I think Hipmunk and AA simply have a deal that
won't really hurt AA.

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HackrNwsDesignr
I can see hipmunk fetching way more than 10 million, if they decide to sell.
It addresses a huge paint point in sites people have little brand loyalty
because people hop around for deals to airlines they _do_ have brand loyalty
for anyways. Hipmunk is 10x easier to use with all the same deals on those
sites, and they are creating brand loyalty with a cute chipmunk. #win

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rmason
Initially I loved HipMunk but I came to find out the agenda they use in hiding
flights does not mirror my preferences.

One recent example I was travelling from Detroit to LAX with my 94 year old
father and I wanted a direct flight. HipMunk showed nothing but Delta.com
showed four daily flights. Sure they were more expensive but I gladly paid the
premium because my dad is too old to be running between gates.

No amount of sorting showed those flights on HipMunk. Maybe if they have the
money they can build a preference layer.

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spez
That may have been a fluke. Delta wasn't listed on Hipmunk for a day or so.

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shashashasha
I love Hipmunk and have used it to buy tickets to as far away as India and
Tokyo to as close as LAX. Buying international flights is usually an
incredibly stressful process for me as there are so many different options,
and in my past few flights to Shanghai booking on Kayak has always ended up
sending me to chase flights that don't exist anymore.

Hipmunk removes that stress for me -- seriously awesome.

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pg
That is a brilliant image. Who made that?

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savrajsingh
Can someone explain the image? So it's the hipmunk chipmunk stalking somebody
in a kayak... Surface great airfare... EDIT: Wait, I get it. Setting sights on
kayak.com. :)

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seiji
Parody of <http://www.google.com/images?q=shark+kayak>

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catch23
I used their service 2 weeks ago... a breeze to find the least agonizing trip.
I'd pay $50 more if the schedule was more pleasing to me.

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hugh3
Hipmunk has a great interface, though I'm afraid I don't always trust it to
find the cheapest flights just yet. Frinstance I asked it for a flight from
Sydney to Melbourne on Feb 10, and the cheapest hipmunk could get me was a
Virgin Blue flight for $241 -- rather expensive for this route. Checking
directly on the Virgin Blue site I found fares as low as $81 on exactly the
same flight.

I've never had similar problems with flights with at least one end in the US
though.

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jeremydavid
I just booked a flight on Hipmunk today.

Brilliant work guys :) You have succeeded in your effort to make finding an
agony-free flight easy.

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Lewisham
This question comes from incompetence, not malice, but why $6m? It seems like
a lot of money for what I thought was a fairly small operation.

Does $6m just not go that far, or is it supposed to last for a long time?

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spez
The cost of just existing in this space is very high, let alone competing in
it. We're a small operation now, but we've got a long way to go, and it won't
be this way for long.

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joshbaptiste
Indeed, airline availability is not an easy business to get into and is
expensive to maintain. Most of our nodes are dedicated to pricing and low fare
search.

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joshu
I am sad I passed on investing in this one.

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timc
congrats guys. love the hipmunk user experience.

