

1 year on, Hipmunk (YC S10) hits 1 million flight + hotel searches a month - waderoush
http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2011/08/22/hipmunk-on-the-make-the-first-birthday-interview/

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purplefruit
I was a relatively senior member at Expedia, and though there is an obvious
bias, I think Hipmunk is a bit overrated. Here's why

(1) They don't own any relationships with suppliers. UI/UX matter, but any
business owner will tell you that those relationships are where the money is.
Hipmunk still has to give 50%+ of it's earnings away to those who own the
relationships.

(2) Hipmunk's differentiating factor is its UI/UX, but frankly, I don't think
it's all that amazing. Its structure and optimization are great for nerds like
me who read hacker news, but try getting your parents (or people who spend big
bucks booking travel) to use it. I have, and the resounding response is how
difficult it is to use. Again, there is a market for their product, but I
think it's designed by nerds for nerds

(3) 1 million flight + hotel searches a month is actually nothing with respect
to the market, especially considering how much I see ads for hipmunk. Anyone
can make a white-label travel site and pay for traffic.

I'm not trying to be a contrarian just to be an asshole. And Hipmunk might
have great things in the pipeline, but for now, they're one of hundreds of
travel sites in my opinion.

~~~
spez
1) Not sure what you're basing this claim on, but it's false.

2) To each his own, I suppose, but I have conflicting anecdotal evidence.
Hipmunk passes the "parents test" with all of our parents :) And as for
"people who spend big bucks booking travel," I can point to the huge amount of
email we receive from assistants who use us exclusively. Maybe we're not
everything to everyone, but we're at least making some people very happy.

3) We do re-target quite a bit, and that's probably what you're seeing. Most
of our growth has come organically, which again speaks to the fact that we
actually do help people find planes / hotels in far less time than our
competitors, including Expedia.

~~~
purplefruit
Ah re #1 - I was under the impression that you were actually using Orbitz
inventory for hotels (flights are through GDS I assume - but barely make money
anyway). re #2 - yah totally subjective and I have no data besides anecdotes
re #3 - again I have no data to support this. Just generally incredibly
suspect of any growth that comes from SEM (though there's clearly cases where
it's worked). Good to hear there's some retention, though.

~~~
spez
For hotels, we do get Orbitz inventory, but we also have a number of direct
relationships. As you know, hotels are much happier to do business with people
like us because they're not perpetually going out of business.

We've experimented with SEM, but it's not really cost effective for us.
Everyone else in the business runs their own ads, giving them an ad-arbitrage
business model we simply don't have. The upside to our customers is that the
site is cleaner, the downside is our margins are skinnier.

~~~
purplefruit
Makes sense. I wasn't trying to dog on hipmunk too much. Like I said, I
actually really like it. My biggest thing with the UI was whether or not non-
analytically-minded people appreciate the nuances you guys are working on.
Anyways, happy to chat more if you're interested. I can also fuck off :P

~~~
david927
_I can also fuck off_

What? Grow a pair. Everything you said in your first post is most certainly
valid. These guys are full of shit and you called them on it, then you backed
off on the first confrontation. I think you can do better than that.

~~~
purplefruit
I'm just being diplomatic, my friend. There's no reason for pointless
confrontation on some internet forum. Though I appreciate the support, dawg.

~~~
david927
Diplomatic is fine, but if you look at the other comments below, they all said
what you said but not as eloquently, which is why you have the top voted
comment. You represented everyone who voted that comment up.

Diplomatic is, "I wish you guys luck." It is not backing off your statement at
the first sign of any sort of resistance to it.

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shalmanese
I want to love Hipmunk and I do a search on it every time I travel but Kayak
has consistently returned flights that are $50 - $100 cheaper. I love the
Hipmunk interface but not $100 worth.

~~~
spez
Have an example? We should have the same fares as pretty much everyone else.
There are some holes, but none in the US to my knowledge.

~~~
saucerful
ORD to HNL 12/28 to 1/5.

Hipmunk: $1092. Kayak: $917.

(Both reservations have one layover in each direction and include tax. Kayak
sends me to United.com directly while Hipmunk takes me to Orbitz.)

~~~
michaelfairley
Edit: This is not actually true. I stand corrected.

The Kayak number doesn't include fees and taxes, whereas the Hipmunk number
does.

~~~
saucerful
Nope, from the the footnote: "Prices are per person and are for e–tickets and
include all taxes & fees in USD."

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MatthewB
I have used hipmunk a handful of times and it is dead simple to use.

I do have a few problems with it:

1\. There have been a few times that I have found a flight only to click
through to another online flight aggregator (orbitz etc) to find they don't
have the rates specified on hipmunk. Very frustrating.

2\. I hate, hate, hate dealing with other aggregators (again..orbitz etc). I
don't know if they do this already or it is in their long-term plan, but
Hipmunk would benefit from working directly with Airline companies. Apologies
if they already do this and I didn't see it.

3\. This is less of a problem and more of a request: rental cars! Please do
for rental car search what you did for flight search. It took me hours to find
a car to rent after searching through the usual suspect's websites (hertz,
budget, avis). Their websites are beyond terrible. For example, I went to
select the pickup location for a rental car (on Budget) and when I clicked the
location, the page reloaded with zero error feedback. I assume there was a
problem with my selection but how was I suppose to know what it is? I clicked
all the options and it just kept reloading the page. Terrible.

Hipmunk is a great product tackling a hard problem. However, they have a lot
of work to do. I will continue to use them and hopefully they will continue to
improve. Great job so far.

~~~
spez
#1 We do our best to mitigate this. Unfortunately, it's also the nature of the
business. Availability is constantly changing. What's really mindblowing is
that Orbitz will often have flights in _their own_ results that will error
out. This isn't specific to Orbitz either, everyone has to deal with this.

#2 This is a big priority for us. We already have many direct deals, and more
are on the way.

~~~
MatthewB
How about #3? Maybe the lack of response to that means you're already working
on it:)

~~~
pgebhard
Take a look at vroomvroomvroom.com. It's the site I always use for booking
rental cars. Simple UI and no hidden fees.

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rohi81
I love the visualization of Hipmunk, the problem is the leads never yield the
price on the UI. It's always expensive, but I love the filters and their whole
concept, wish they had better price accuracy.

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bryanh
I love Hipmunk, but I think they assume their superior interface warrants
pretty radical price increases (anything over 5% is kind of ridiculous
considering how easy it is to compare prices for the _exact same flights_ with
another competitor).

Maybe I'm missing something here, but it's never been worth it for me.

~~~
spez
Price increases? We should have the same fares as everyone else online.

~~~
jhdavids8
Spez, it took me no time at all to find a flight cheaper on Kayak than on
Hipmunk. From Chicago to Honolulu (roundtrip) on 8/26 - 8/28, Kayak's cheapest
rate is $936 total while Hipmunk's is $1063 total. This was my second search
comparison between Kayak and Hipmunk. Not to be an ass, but this wasn't
difficult at all, so you might want to incorporate some stricter testing
before just saying that you "should have the same fares as everyone else
online". Asking HN readers for examples when it's this easy appears as if you
haven't done much testing and as if you're getting us to test for you.

~~~
danilocampos
One of the tough things about this stuff, as alluded in other threads, is how
frequently inventory changes. I just ran the same search you described as
close to the same time as possible and...

<http://i.imgur.com/7jQsm.png>

<http://i.imgur.com/AUnb5.png>

Both at $1063.

So timing can make a _huge_ difference.

~~~
jhdavids8
Weird...it's still the same prices ($1063 and $936) for me. You may very well
be right though, but I find it hard to believe that it changes in the second
or two it takes me to do my search on Kayak to HipMunk

<http://i.imgur.com/a1VMw.png>

<http://i.imgur.com/W7dZg.png>

------
hugh3
I love hipmunk for flights, but I'm less in love with the UI for hotels. I
find it more confusing, and less easy to see what's good value. So if that's
where they're really making their money then maybe they need to adapt it a
bit.

I can see how in _some_ cases it'd be great. If I'm looking for a hotel
convenient to, say, the Denver Convention Center, then I can zoom in on that
area and pick my favourite out of the small number of hotels within walking
distance.

But if my goal is "I want a room somewhere in San Francisco, I don't
especially care where as long as it's reasonably convenient, but it has to be
reasonably good value but not _too_ cheap" then I just get overwhelmed by
having too many options and no obvious way to narrow them down (except by
geography, which in this case I don't care too much about). And while I can
easily understand "agony" as a function of price and duration, precisely what
"ecstasy" should mean is beyond me.

Oh, and it seems to only tell me the average yelp rating, rather than the
actual star class of the hotel, so it's really hard for me to decide whether
$169 for the "Hotel Abri", with four yelp stars, is better or worse value than
$106 a night for the "Hayes Valley Inn", also with four yelp stars. And then
the Four Seasons, for $501 a night, gets 4.3 stars, but does that mean it's
only slightly better than the Hayes Valley Inn? Probably not. Yelp stars
generally aren't that useful except for identifying _really_ awful places,
since everywhere seems to rate somewhere between 3.5 and 4.5.

What I'd _really_ like to see is information on how the price being asked for
this hotel right now compares to the average price at which it's usually sold.

------
mathrawka
I love the UI and use it pretty frequently, but I have never booked a flight
through there site because they do not support flying with infants and
children.

The prices for my most recent trip were the same for what I searched on Kayak
actually, but it may be because that it was more short notice (2-3 weeks in
the future).

------
eam
Just booked my first plane flight ever 1 week ago using hipmunk. Took me about
5 minutes to do so.

~~~
kn0thing
Thank you very much!

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ezl
I'd like to hear about how they've attracted the volume. I never see ads for
them and 1mm searches/mo seems bigger than the set of "techcrunch + hacker
news readers".

~~~
statictype
That's interesting because I see ads for them _all the time_.

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Hisoka
1 million searches is OK but Compete shows them at 200K visitors/month:
<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/hipmunk.com/> and surprisingly, it shows
they had MORE visits a year ago than they do around this time... so where's
the growth? it seems stagnant...

~~~
david927
It's really not much considering how much they advertise and my guess is that
number is an aberration they paid for and that the real numbers are closer to
what Compete shows.

They're trying to build excitement again, but if you ask Hollywood they will
tell you that you can't make people like something they don't, no matter how
much you market it.

~~~
Hisoka
I tend to agree. Hipmunk has a hip name, and is trying to create a brand for
themselves, but it's hard to use word of mouth to market a flight search
engine... it's like trying to use viral marketing to market a detergent.

It's hard to compete against established brands like Expedia, and Orbitz that
has millions to play with.

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suking
Congrats on the milestone - by comparison how many does Orbitz & Kayak do?
Anyone know?

