

Hipmunk Launches Flight Deals - mikegreenspan
http://www.hipmunk.com/deals?referer=hn1

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nthitz
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.

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jyothepro
saw the same thing

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

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pinko
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.)

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stephendaimler
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.

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pinko
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.

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

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geverett
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

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jonathanjaeger
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.

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

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

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photorized
Your guys should do something about your ads on Reddit.

I think those are making people annoyed with the service.

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

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timdoug
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!

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mspecter
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.

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tomhoward
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...](http://adioso.com/us/nyc-to-omaha-nebraska-in-march-any-friday-under-
usd350-return-2-to-3-days-later)

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.

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desireco42
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!

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tomhoward
How about this?

[http://adioso.com/us/san-francisco-to-domestic-
return-5-to-1...](http://adioso.com/us/san-francisco-to-domestic-
return-5-to-10-days-later)

[http://adioso.com/us/san-francisco-to-international-
return-5...](http://adioso.com/us/san-francisco-to-international-
return-5-to-10-days-later)

[http://adioso.com/us/san-francisco-to-western-europe-
return-...](http://adioso.com/us/san-francisco-to-western-europe-
return-5-to-10-days-later)

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

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desireco42
Yeah, that's it, thanks for demonstration :)

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stephendaimler
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.

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

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stephendaimler
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.

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slash-dot
It seems to be us only :(

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nmeyer
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>

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xoail
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.

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desireco42
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.

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

