

Why Hipmunk Is The World's Best Travel Site - kreutz
http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2012/06/29/why-hipmunk-is-the-worlds-best-travel-site/

======
rdl
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).

~~~
dbaupp
_> 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.)

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

------
77ko
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.

------
aik
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?

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dkrich
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.

~~~
calbear81
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)

~~~
dkrich
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.

------
Cor
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.

~~~
ernestipark
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.

------
bambax
> _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."_

~~~
gruseom
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...](https://www.google.com/search?q=everything+else+is+public+relations)
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&...](http://books.google.com/books?ei=5WjvT-6JKsrgqAGi9cCFBA&id=VydZAAAAYAAJ&&q=%22everything+else+is+public+relations%22#search_anchor)).
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...](http://mikeswritingworkshop.blogspot.com/2010/03/comfort-afflicted-
and-afflict.html)), 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/>.

~~~
bambax
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!!

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

Their price predictor for certain routes is quite accurate.

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

~~~
scrrr
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.

~~~
curiousfiddler
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.

------
shanecleveland
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.

------
chris123
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.

~~~
thelovebug
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.

~~~
Heinleinian
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.

------
larsu
_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.

------
bob_kelso
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).

------
berberous
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.

------
Patient0
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.

~~~
joshwa
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.

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

------
genwin
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.

------
leandono
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).

------
meanguy
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.

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

Ever tried Google flight search? Instant.

~~~
jvdh
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.

~~~
Spearchucker
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.

~~~
brunnsbe
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.

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

------
saturn
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)

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

~~~
saturn
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..

~~~
raldi
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.

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

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

~~~
antidaily
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.

------
Shah_Sid
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)

------
cin_
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.

