
Hipmunk Says Goodbye - ienjoythebeach
https://www.hipmunk.com/tailwind/hipmunk-says-goodbye/
======
seltzered_
There's a number of comments about how hipmunk declined or didn't have good
prices. It reminded me of a recent Matthew Stoller piece (
[https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-wave-of-terror-in-
ame...](https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-wave-of-terror-in-american-
commerce) ) :

"Similarly, I spoke on a panel a few months ago in Congress on airlines, and
Adam Goldstein, the former CEO of flight travel booking site Hipmunk, talked
as well. I used to love Hipmunk, but it’s terrible now and I don’t use it.
Goldstein explained why. He noted that after the wave of consolidation among
airlines during the Obama years, airlines stopped allowing his site to have
access to pricing data unless they hid certain routes to consumers. This move
to avoid competition destroyed the business and harmed consumers. (It’s also
obviously illegal, and the Department of Transportation has antitrust
authority it doesn’t use to stop it.) Why did Goldstein speak publicly?
Hipmunk sold itself off and he’s no longer there."

~~~
dmix
> after the wave of consolidation among airlines during the Obama years,

Ah the "too big to fail" years where everything consolidated and only got
bigger including the big evil banks which took the brunt of the public's fury
following the 2008 crisis (and occupy).

It's funny how so much of the regulations put in place had the opposite effect
and made running small firms (ie, with more liability than the big ones)
became almost impossible. Following the crisis there are now 5 mega banks who
control everything and tons of the small banks shutdown and found it
impossible to operate in the market with the new conditions,

It's sad that most people's consumer-interfacing perception of markets is
often through these megacorps which exist in heavily regulated systems (which
everyone then blames their poor experiences on markets), which are often
structures which were the result of reactions to bad behaviours of a few big
bad guys, which then resulted in policy only designed for the big bad firms.
Meanwhile the other 90% of the marketplace, who did nothing wrong and who
aren't the same size, were left dealing with the new overhead.

Automotive, airlines, finance, energy, bio/pharma, etc are all getting
consolidating into smaller and smaller groups of megafirms or owned by opaque
equity groups.

I don't know what the solution is but in so much of dystopian fiction the
world is run by a few giant companies who control everything. That sort of
system naturally creates a greater disconnect between the needs of the average
consumer using the service and the whims and needs of the company (for ex:
boycotts become meaningless/ineffective and consumer power lessens).

Meanwhile data is showing the number of new businesses being created are
lessening and people are wondering why inequality keeps increasing, when
forming small/medium sized companies used to be the main way to become
upwardly mobile.

Soon the only option for upwards mobility is working your way up megacorps or
making small companies who just get sold off to a bigger firm within the first
10yrs of operations.

I don't mean for this to be a diatribe against regulations but this sort of
thing concerns me and regulation is only one of many forces pushing the
economy towards this structure. I still think entrepreneurship is forever
underrated in inequality discussions but its such a complex problem to
confront, I just hope that the future really isn't just endless consolidation
and an endless series of political barriers put in place preventing new shops
from improving the mistakes of the past (which was a reliable source of
progress for a long time).

~~~
majormajor
I don't understand you using consolidation and abuse of power as a reason to
_dislike_ regulation. There are plenty of non-regulatory incentives for
consolidation. Why not simply regulate consolidation? Target large holding
companies and megacorps with aggressive taxation policies on revenue or
headcount or market cap or similar? And then _enforce_ the regulation with
teeth?

There are always going to be creative people coming up with new ways to be bad
actors, so regulation has to be an evolving constant. But responding with an
_aversion_ to regulation is just giving the game to the bad actors.

~~~
devcpp
Oh hell no. More lawyers to find more loopholes. How about addressing the root
cause: the lack of competition? The way to do this is lower the barrier to
entry, which is made of 100% over-regulation.

You can involve all the antitrust you want, as long as you don't lower the
barrier to entry you're just lying to yourself and adding more useless
middlemen.

~~~
wpietri
The barrier to entry is definitely not "100% over-regulation". Starting an
airline would be extremely difficult even if it were entirely unregulated. You
need airplanes, pilots, and a variety of flight and ground crew. You need
landing slots at busy airports. And then you need a customer base big enough
to fill up your flights.

Even if all of that were easy, you still want anti-trust regulation, because
airlines are a cutthroat business. If you start up NerdBird Inc, specializing
in SF-Austin flights, it is absolutely in the interests of United and American
to undercut you on that route for as long as it takes to drive you out of
business. Which will probably not be very long, as airlines are expensive to
run and margins are thin.

~~~
bbarn
Look at what happened to Virgin America? It was a consumer-focused airline
that was doing very well financially, and it was forcibly acquired because of
regulations that US airlines must be US owned.

~~~
wpietri
Nope. That was a problem early on for Virgin America. But Branson was quite
explicit: consolidation was the problem: [https://www.virgin.com/richard-
branson/virgin-america](https://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/virgin-america)

~~~
bbarn
Yeah, read the article. He was against the merger - regulation drove the
forced consolidation, which he did not want. He posted about it a ton when it
happened.

------
scottrogowski
I worked for Hipmunk for a little over two years before they were purchased
and have some fond memories of my time there. There have been a lot of
articles on HN lately suggesting that it is better to work for a large company
over a startup. Based on my time there, I would strongly disagree. I came in
as a junior engineer (feral would be an appropriate term) and during my time,
touched basically every part of the web application - backend and frontend. I
made a lot of mistakes and through it all, I left significantly more
experienced than I was when I started. I don't think there was a better place
I could have spent my time at that stage of my career. My advice would be, do
work for a startup. Even better, try to work for a startup like Hipmunk with
an experienced senior engineering team who have worked on some hard problems -
like how to scale Reddit in the era before AWS. You'll learn a lot.

~~~
untog
But a lot of larger companies have great programs for junior developers that
ensure they learn a lot.

In my experience and stories I've heard it seems that you can have an amazing
time as a junior developer at a startup. If it's a good one. It it isn't,
you'll be absolutely miserable and have no support. Similarly, you can be at a
large company with a fantastic program for junior developers and learn a lot.
And you can also work at an awful large company where you'll learn nothing.
"Startup vs large company" feels like a false choice in many ways.

~~~
scottrogowski
My experience with (2) larger companies, and confirmed from conversations with
friends, is that while you tend to have more support, you are often placed on
individual siloed teams where you stay for years. I think the key benefit of
smaller companies is that you can work across so many different aspects of the
application. Process also tends to be less burdensome so you are able to
devote more of your time to the text editor writing business logic.

Still, my experience and my circle is limited so I suspect some might have had
the opposite experience.

~~~
nraynaud
Someone told me they spend 2 years in a team responsible for some of the undo
menu at a giant software company. Incredible siloing.

~~~
ericd
I was interviewing at a megacorp a long while back, my interviewer was solely
responsible for the pie charts in some old application. He mentioned in the
interview that it was totally feasible to run your own startup on the side.

~~~
cezart
An acquaintance of mine worked at Google for one entire year on the
functionality of one single button in GMail (I don't recall what it was
specifically). He was very disappointed, left and launched a startup.

------
johnhess
This is a shame, and says more about the consolidation of the tech industry
than Hipmunk's product.

One of Hipmunk's founders spoke to a course that I was in about their
experience as a founder and how they were running their business. A few weeks
later, a well known founder of another travel search company visited the class
and said outright that if Hipmunk did have any success, that they would copy
those features and that Hipmunk couldn't threaten their position. That is
exactly what happened.

To boot, Hipmunk was acquired and shuttered by another travel conglomerate.

~~~
linuxftw
An often echoed sentiment around here is 'is your startup idea a product, or a
feature?' If you startup is a feature, it's just going to be copied.

The only way to prevent this is with patents.

~~~
rhizome
Twitter is a feature.

~~~
hobs
Are networking effects a product or a feature?

~~~
rhizome
Category error, they're an effect. Is hunger a kind of food?

------
cosmotic
Hipmunk was simply the best. Very clean interface, no frills, quite thorough
(except southwest), best presentation, easy to sort/evaluate ... A cute
chipmunk.

Looking at the three alternatives from all the other comments (google, matrix
and skyscanner), they seem 5 or so years behind the times.

~~~
stjohnswarts
Southwest doesn't give out its pricing information at all. Which is why
hipmunk didn't have it.

~~~
ec109685
Not very consumer friendly.

~~~
nitwit005
At the time when southwest cut them off, the online travel sites were
expecting $5 to $10 in compensation. Offering the lowest price required
trimming that cost.

News story from 2002: [https://www.cnet.com/news/southwest-soars-without-
travel-sit...](https://www.cnet.com/news/southwest-soars-without-travel-
sites/)

~~~
Dylan16807
To trim the cost of a referral program, you shut down the referral program. Or
cut the payout.

That's not a reason to stop supplying data entirely.

~~~
nitwit005
There are a lot of sites that I would love if they had nice free APIs. People
generally don't create those without a financial benefit.

~~~
Dylan16807
The financial benefit is getting flight bookings.

This is an API where the airline effectively charged a _negative_ cost for
use. If they decided it was too negative, why not try adjusting the price?

------
neonate
It doesn't seem to be mentioned in this thread yet that the founders tried to
buy it back:

[https://skift.com/2020/01/14/hipmunk-co-founders-spurned-
by-...](https://skift.com/2020/01/14/hipmunk-co-founders-spurned-by-sap-
concur-in-attempt-to-buy-back-the-company/)

~~~
fergie
"SAP Concur refused the offer. It intends to shutter both the Hipmunk consumer
brand and the Concur Hipmunk business travel incarnation on January 23."

Do Sap Concur stand to gain by closing Hipmunk down? Why would they not take
money for something they were going to destroy anyway?

~~~
buro9
It's probably now integrated with their systems, and to disentangle would
require engineering. You can argue that so long as the $$$ of the sale pays
for it that SAP should sell it, but I would argue that if those engineers
could be working on something else that is of higher value that you shouldn't
try to sell it, especially if the cost of disentangling isn't well known.

------
vector_spaces
One of my first technical interviews after teaching myself to code was with
Hipmunk. They were incredibly nice and patient with me despite me being a
clueless bundle of nerves, and I learned a lot from their very practical take
home challenge, although by the time I had finished it they already hired
someone. Thanks to them though I came to love working with Redis and Tornado
(Python async framework). It's a fond memory and I'm disappointed to hear
about this.

I hope that the team are able to quickly find other roles and don't find their
lives too disrupted by this.

~~~
jedberg
Most of the team has already moved back to reddit. :)

~~~
zck
As a random person who's been on reddit for over a decade now, it's really
cool to see how close-knit the reddit team is. Partially I'm jealous, since
I've never found anything even close to that.

~~~
stjohnswarts
I think being in the trenchs on small teams does that to you :) .

------
dewey
I'll really miss it, the visual way of seeing how a flight is split up and how
long the layovers are was better than all the other aggregators. Also with
their sorting by "agony" feature was great and it was always easy to see the
type of the airplane.

I don't know any other aggregator who does it this well.

~~~
degenerate
Google maps automatically factors in "agony" when you ask for transit
directions (by design), and the " _schedule explorer_ " gives you a visual
layout of all the travel times and transfers you can use. It's very similar to
the way Hipmunk displays flight information, so I never understood why Google
Flights didn't adopt the schedule explorer from Google Maps...

------
slg
Anecdotally, it seemed like Hipmunk had nothing to motivate users to actually
book through them. It was a great site to find what specific flight to take.
The sorting by "agony" was great and I have never seen any other site have an
interface as seamless as the sliders you could use to narrow down flights to
specific windows of time. But once I had my preferred flight number, I booked
somewhere else to get that mile bonus or whatever other incentive existed
elsewhere.

------
bitL
This is sad - Hipmunk greatly facilitated my digital nomad lifestyle at some
point as I could chain multiple flights in multiple months together to make "a
travel around the world" schedule, i.e. 1 month intervals
Boston->Miami->Zurich->Kyoto->Sydney->Auckland->Honolulu->Vancouver->San
Francisco, all without any return flights and spaced as I liked.

Is there any other service allowing the same?

~~~
cglong
Google Flights supports "multi-city" travel plans that does exactly this!

------
phsource
This is a long time coming: for more context, Hipmunk was acquired by Concur
back in 2016 for $58MM [1] as the flights meta-search business was just
getting tougher and tougher

As someone who's dabbled in flights bookings (BookWithMatrix) and now am
working on a travel startup (Wanderlog,
[https://wanderlog.com](https://wanderlog.com), a Google Docs/Trips for travel
planning), flights are just not that profitable. In North America, you'd be
lucky to get 1-2% commissions. In the rest of the world, it's a bit better,
but Hipmunk was definitely North America-first.

Concur never was a consumer company and Hipmunk never was going to make a ton
for them, so it was just a matter of time. RIP -- a lot of their best features
(not just showing the cheapest flights, but the "Best" based on agony) have
made it into all major meta-search tools, so it's not for nothing!

(Also, I personally use a combination of ITA Matrix, Google Flights, and
Skyscanner now. ITA Matrix still has time bars, if you loved that UI; Google
Flights is just so fast, and Skyscanner searches low-cost carriers that Google
Flights sometimes misses)

[1]
[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/hipmunk](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/hipmunk)

~~~
dmix
Can someone explain to me what Concur does? I'm guessing it handles a bunch of
the travel stuff for bigcos with lots of travelling sales people?

~~~
inferiorhuman
Everything Concur does, it does extremely poorly.

~~~
0898
Question if anybody knows: did Concur used to be good, and then became trash
after it was acquired by SAP? Or was it always clunky and hostile?

~~~
filmgirlcw
In my experience, it was always trash. I’ve had to use it at every company
I’ve ever worked at and it has never been good. At one company, the rule
restrictions were so onerous that that and the UX made booking travel so
appalling, I paid my own way more than once and then fought for a
reimbursement rather than using it.

I travel pretty frequently so I often just call American Express (who acts as
a Concur reseller for my company) directly to do the corporate bookings rather
than futzing with Concur. I usually find the route I want ahead and then call
Amex to price it out/book it. American Express is great — tho my company is
big enough to have dedicated CSRs for our account, which helps. Concur is just
frustrating.

That said, I will say that the worst parts of Concur are usually employer-made
decisions. If your employer has really restrictive travel policies, that makes
the Concur experience even worse. For instance, I’ve had the system insist I
book an indirect flight that costs more than a direct because of how something
is coded, with no way to override. My current employer has very decent travel
policies so that’s not an issue, but if it is, it makes the terrible UX and
bad search even worse.

------
filmgirlcw
I used to use Hipmunk, but at this point, I’ve built up a lot of airline
loyalty and often find booking directly with the carrier or through a credit
card portal (if I’m using points) for personal travel gives me the best fare.
All my business travel has to go through Concur anyway, so search tools like
Hipmunk and Kayak don’t matter, no matter how nice the interface.

When I didn’t fly all the time, I didn’t care about loyalty. But I did 160,000
actual airline miles (far more FF miles earned) last year (most of them on one
alliance, but enough to get lowest tier status on two others) last year and at
this point, I’ll pay extra for Delta because I get auto-upgraded to Comfort+
at booking, I have a very good baggage allowance regardless of service class
(assuming I’m main cabin and not basic economy, which I wouldn’t do anyway), I
have a lounge membership, and I get frequent upgrades. At that point, my
comfort and those benefits are way more important than saving a few dollars
across airlines.

And that’s the problem with these types of services, I think. They cater to
the occasional traveler who doesn’t travel enough to make a profit (unless
you’re Google and you own the software everyone else has to license), whereas
the frequent travelers are either booking through corporate tools or directly
with one airline because they have loyalty — or both.

Catering to then majority of flyers who fly once a year, when margins are what
they are on flights, is a tough business. It is interesting that Hipmunk's
parent company got a piece of my $60k in travel last year (most of that was
work, maybe $2500 was personal), because that’s where your percentages can
matter.

~~~
splonk
> Hipmunk's parent company got a piece of my $60k in travel last year (most of
> that was work, maybe $2500 was personal), because that’s where your
> percentages can matter.

I think for corporate travel management, the fee structure is usually $X per
transaction, rather than a percentage of the fare, although I can't speak to
exactly how Concur charges, and it'll differ depending on the size of the
customer. Average ticket prices for corporate airfare are likely considerably
higher than for consumer, since that's where the majority of business class
and refundable tickets are sold.

------
jba
Bah, not a huge surprise given how brutal the travel tech industry is, but
they remained my fav travel site - seemed to often find fares that were
missing off google flights or other competitors. Loved the U/I too. RIP.

~~~
tempsy
Define "brutal"

Booking has made money off travel hand over fist this past decade. It's highly
competitive, sure, but for a reason since hotels pay massive premiums to these
websites to drive sales.

~~~
lotsofpulp
Hotels have less of a monopoly on travel than airlines. Plus most hotels are
franchised, so the brands don’t have an incentive to lower commissions paid as
they still get their royalties from gross revenue, and it all comes out of the
hotel owner’s pockets.

------
ape4
As a Canadian, a feature I'd really like... request no stops in the USA. eg
when flying to South America. (USA is a great country but doesn't get "in
transit")

~~~
rconti
How many countries do? I take it for granted traveling through Europe, but
made the 'mistake' of booking a USA->Peru trip through Mexico City rather than
taking a lounger journey through Miami, and had to clear customs and fill out
a landing card for Mexico. Then it ended up being the same when transiting
through intermediate countries in South America. I have so damn many passport
stamps from just one trip, where I'm much more accustomed to shengen and EU
travel in general.

~~~
ape4
Perhaps its small countries that do it best. Eg Hong Kong, Singapore. Well,
the website needs a database of "in transit" aware countries (or airports) and
option to prefer them.

~~~
rconti
Ah, I've not flown through those other major international hubs. I bet places
like Dubai are super easy as well. I vote for your proposal! :)

------
why-oh-why
Something that’s hard for me to find is a website that gets me from point A to
point B without caring about stop count and duration. Is the flight cheap and
stops 23 hours in Hong Kong and 20 hours in Kuala Lumpur? I’ll take it.

Also Kiwi and Google Flights let you make wide searches but their efficiency
drops so low they’re basically useless in my experience. You’re better off
searching day by day.

Hipmunk never returned the best rates or routes for me so I had to drop it.

Lately I’m really into dohop.com because it shows routes that others don’t
(South East Asia)

~~~
yezr
[https://www.skiplagged.com](https://www.skiplagged.com) is exactly what you
are looking for! dirt cheap flights sometimes with like 12 hour layovers. If
you have the time (but not necessarily the money) it is just the ticket

~~~
splonk
Assuming skiplagged is still doing hidden city ticketing, it's important to
recognize the risks involved here (primarily that overuse of it may cause
airlines to reject your bookings and/or shut down your frequent flier
accounts). It's probably a reasonable tradeoff for someone just looking for
the cheapest flight once, but likely isn't for frequent travelers.

------
jessriedel
Off-topic: I have been a long-time Kayak user, but don't see many people
mention it hear when discussing Hipmunk. Does anyone feel strongly that one of
the competitors is better than Kayak? If so, could you elaborate?

I have occasionally used Google Flights, but it seemed to have fewer knobs and
I could not find any features that made me want to stay. The only competitors
I have consistently but rarely used is Skiplagged, since it performs a kind of
search (of somewhat dubious morals) that can't be done with Kayak.

~~~
makmanalp
(disclaimer - worked at Kayak a long time ago)

A big part of what made Kayak good was that it was (is?) a solid data product
- basically a gigantic farm of scrapers and crawlers glommed together with
direct-from-provider (airline, hotel etc) data ingestion pipelines and
coherence protocols that flowed into massive unified local cache databases.
All this to ensure that you, as a customer, saw the most up to date and widest
variety of information possible.

When Kayak IPO'd, it was around the time that ITA software (massive airline
data provider you've never heard of) got sold to google, and there was a lot
of hand wringing over whether this'd spell the end for Kayak. But even then it
looks like ITA supplied only 42% of flight data (check out the S1 filing
[https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1312928/000119312510...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1312928/000119312510262521/ds1.htm#toc117777_2)),
the rest from other data providers (Amadeus etc), online travel agencies, or
individual airlines.

So given that, Hipmunk's focus on "we're gonna make the UX so much better" was
admirable (especially given the state of a lot of the competition), and it
pushed everyone to do better in that regard, but always felt a bit naive as a
business strategy to me, since I think most people will pick the site with the
slightly worse UI and better / cheaper / non-stale flights rather than the
other way round. Especially in a non-premium race to the bottom industry like
online tickets. And getting quality data takes a big team and lots of money
and infrastructure, as well as lots of business relationships.

But I always thought they were a cut above a lot of the other competitors
which were bad UIs mangled with dozens of ads thrown together in a slapshod
way on top of the same 1-2 data providers.

~~~
jessriedel
Thanks! I have the vague impression that there are fewer stale or missing
flights on Kayak than competitors, but I haven't done a bunch of comparisons
recently, so I'm very interested in what others think.

------
vecplane
That's really sad. Hipmunk has been the only way I've found flights for the
last several years, and I always loved it!

Personally, I don't know what else to use instead.

~~~
tobinfricke
Google Flights is excellent.

------
grumo
I'll miss Hipmunk. My career as a video producer started by creating an
animation explaining their service back in late 2010. At that time, Alexis
Ohanian was their marketing principal and he introduced me to many YC startups
in need of similar videos. Soon after, I got to meet him, Adam Goldstein, and
Ashton Kuther in person at SxSw 2011. Super nice people. Fond memories!

------
IgorPartola
Unrelated: it took me until this very moment to realize that hipmunk is
chipmunk without the C. Is this the origin of the name and I am literally the
last to figure it out?

~~~
ludwigvan
You are definitely not the last since I hadn’t realized it either :)

------
tonystubblebine
Oh, bummer!

I love the product and have even used it within the last few days. Thank you
Adam and Steve for building something I used for 9 years.

------
Multiplayer
I had the weirdest experience at the airport yesterday, LAX. I went to the the
United ticket counter to buy a ticket for lax to nyc, same day. They told me I
was better off buying online. In fact they looked completely unprepared to
book a ticket. I couldn’t believe it. I checked other counters and sure
enough, I was at the right place.

So I tried using Hipmunk yesterday. It felt tired to me for some reason. I
ended up booking on Amex platinum travel. Who do people use for booking
flights?

~~~
ulfw
I'm a bit confused. You'd go to the United ticket counter in person but then
don't go to united.com when asked to book online?

May I ask why that wasn't your first choice for this particular incident?

~~~
monksy
Why go to UA.com when you can talk to a person that can tell you about the
plane loads, what has more availability with FC/B. Also if you're flying that
day, they can tell you more about the backpressure on flights. Not everything
has to do with the cheapest price.

Most of the airlines like to complain that people are only focused on the
price. They market themselves and try to make themselves look at price. They
don't offer a lot of transparency on their product and they complain why
people are using their site as intended. (Or avoiding it with comparisons)

------
nik736
I always liked the Hipmunk branding :-)

~~~
majos
It and Padmapper are two services I occasionally use almost entirely because
they have cute mascots. I’d probably even buy t-shirts with them.

------
unethical_ban
I really liked Hipmunk's interface and used it to dream often.

What I want out of airline aggregators, and what GFlights seems to do alright
at:

    
    
      * Multi-city itineraries
      * Source and destination searches based on region/airport group (e.g. "AUS or DFW or IAH -> MUC or LHR)
      * Date range searching for flexible schedules and pricing
    

One of my example searches recently:

I want a flight from somewhere in Texas to somewhere in western europe, then
to Dublin, then back to somewhere in Texas. I want to go for 9-13 days in
February or March. Show me results by price.

GFilghts seems to do this pretty well. I used to like Hipmunk, but I don't
know if it had any competitive advantage over other systems mentioned here.
They certainly pushed the envelope, even influencing the tools we name today.

And to other comments, it is indeed unfortunate that pricing data is so
obscured by airlines. Another instance in which the government should mandate
more transparency.

------
Mizza
Damn, I've been a Hipmunk user since the very start. Probably 50 different
flights through them. Can anybody recommend a replacement, particularly the
sort-by-price, sort-by-agony, and the visual UI?

I would have paid a 2-5% HipMunk fee to not have to go to all of the
individual websites..

~~~
bagels
I've been using google flights after Hipmunk started losing carriers.

------
eldavido
Unusually personal for me because I worked in one of their offices, but for a
different company, after they had moved out.

Definitely feels like the end of a larger era. So much consolidation, stuff
shutting down. "The end of the beginning", as one popular tech writer put it.

------
xd1936
For those looking for replacements, Google Flights and Skyscanner have been
mentioned in this thread... But also consider checking out Great Escape[1]. It
has a neat UI.

1\. [https://greatescape.co/](https://greatescape.co/)

------
ghc
Really sad. Hipmunk was something I loved and something that took a lot of
pain out of my life.

------
ulfw
RIP poor hipmunk. Been a huge fan of their site.

A sign to never drop the ball and always keep innovating!

------
kampsduac
I used Hipmunk ever since I took Steve Huffman's (founder Reddit and Hipmunk)
Udacity course.

Not surprised it didn't make money, I would always use it alongside Kayak and
then book directly with the airline/hotel/car company.

~~~
bitL
That's how I learned about it as well.

------
neebz
For me Hipmunk had the best calendar control. You could just type in your
dates in pretty much any format and it was able to parse it. No need mess
around with pop-ups and small buttons to switch months etc.

------
einpoklum
This makes me wonder... how should I compare all these flight search sites? I
mean, you may notice one has some feature another don't, but is there
something more methodical?

------
flybrand
What’s your favorite alternative?

~~~
BlameKaneda
I'm a fan of Matrix:
[https://matrix.itasoftware.com/](https://matrix.itasoftware.com/)

~~~
Ididntdothis
Once you get the hang of it, it's great. You can do stuff no other site can
do. This really asks for some kind of query language. Or maybe there is one?

~~~
mpiedrav
Google used to offer the QPX Express[1] API for querying flights. Then it got
killed[2], like 190+ Google services[3]

[1]
[http://web.archive.org/web/20160413025405/https://developers...](http://web.archive.org/web/20160413025405/https://developers.google.com/qpx-
express/v1/trips/search)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15594975](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15594975)

[3] [https://killedbygoogle.com](https://killedbygoogle.com)

------
sntax
I use to work in the flight search industry. It is really hard to compete
because you simply make nothing off of flights (your big margins are on
hotels). I also doubt google let them hang on to the ITA matrix engine API
since they seem to be closing that off to everyone. It is sad to see the last
option for airbnb search in the metasearch space die off, but there are still
plenty of good flight search engines out there.

------
ada1981
Is there a down side to converting some of these things into open source
projects?

It could be cool to turn over the domain and source to a group, let them run
it and use it.

------
haney
Might be off topic, but does anyone know what data providers / sources sites
like Hipmunk and Kayak are pulling this data from? Is there a centralized
source for flight data that’s freely available or is this pay to play? I’m
trying to understand the business model and mechanics of how they sourced the
information they indexed.

~~~
doctorOb
Itinerary information they get from Amadeus[1] or ITA software (which google
acquired to kickstart their flights product). Prices I imagine come from
integrations with the hundreds of online travel agencies like Expedia,
eDreams, etc.

[1] [https://skift.com/2012/08/07/amadeus-working-to-oust-ita-
at-...](https://skift.com/2012/08/07/amadeus-working-to-oust-ita-at-kayak/)

------
homakov
Google Flights as my go-to option. Unparalleled speed, can iterate over 10
days with click of a button.

------
bitL
How much does running a service like Hipmunk cost? It might not be a good
business for the current owner, but it could be profitable for e.g. company of
four people. Wouldn't it be better to give it back to Huffman and run it as a
small project?

------
SergeAx
I am not a travel newbie, but I believe it's the first time I heard about
Hipmunk. What was so innovative about them? It looks like yet another travel
aggregator among at least half dozen of it's kind: Kiwi, SkyScanner, Kayak,
Expedia, Priceline, Orbitz...

~~~
toyg
The big thing at the beginning was the ability to sort by “agony”, i.e. a
combination of travel time, number and length of layovers, and carrier
quality.

To this day I still find it the best search interface if price is not your
only concern. It’s compact and easy to tweak.

Unfortunately, the way they handled payments was too US-centric, which meant I
often ended up looking up a flight with them and then actually booking it
somewhere else (because you don’t want to book an Euro trip with some unknown
US operator who may or may not be accountable if anything goes wrong). Also
some of the cheapest airlines were typically not included.

------
DaniFong
:O

how can this be, Hipmunk was so much better than the competition... people...
people wanted it...

------
misiti3780
I remember Steve H. announced the launch of the company on the Tornado web
server forum (backend was built with tornado). I used them a lot in the past,
especially for the hotel heatmaps, which were super useful.

------
mmhsieh
So what's the new Hipmunk? Most other sites - Orbitz, Travelocity, etc. - are
pretty terrible. HM got more crashy over the last year but even with that,
still better than the alternatives.

------
outside1234
Thanks for all of the help you provided on booking trips for me!

------
narrator
I guess if they were still independent they could just run the app on
maintenance mode. Since hosting is so cheap, they couldn't just pay a small
team to maintain it?

~~~
toyg
Api access to all those services is not cheap.

------
krm01
Warm feelings of the fun UI is the first thing that came to mind. I miss the
products that Show the fun and quirkiness that went into building it.

------
idlewords
This thing is riddled with typos. It seems inconsiderate to say goodbye to
your customers without at least reading the thing through for errors.

~~~
nikanj
Do you also grammar check the eulogies at funerals?

~~~
chris_wot
If I’m listening to them, in general I’d expect some thought put into it.

------
midgetjones
They keep talking about access to data, but not what's happening to the data
itself. Is it being deleted? Sold?

------
anonu
Reminds me of milewise. Bought by merrissa Mayer as an acquihire company for
Yahoo. Great idea that was left to die

------
mixmastamyk
Bummer, I loved hipmunk's interface. Their time graph and sorting by agony was
the best I've seen.

------
RangerScience
Aww :( I know that other sites offer real advantages to Hipmunk, but to this
day nothing beats their UI.

------
mattcantstop
We need to use SAP Concur at work for travel booking. It is possibly the worst
software I have used.

------
CrankyBear
Well hell. I quite liked Hipmunk.

------
mmhsieh
Curious as to the terms of the exit in 2016. Does anyone know? This was a
great site.

~~~
_marlowe_
This is a little speculative but doesn't seem like a reach
[https://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/concur-acquires-
hipmun...](https://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/concur-acquires-hipmunk.html)

I suspect the common didn't get out alive.

------
Aeolun
A generous 8 days notice of the product shutting down. That’s a new record I
think.

------
fortran77
Their name always confounded me. I never remembered what they did when someone
mentioned this company. For some reasons, other "generically" named companies
(Amazon, Adobe, Apple) don't have this issue, but this synthetic name just
didn't ever mean "air travel" to me.

------
polymath21
It's unfortunate for Hipmunk to just be turned off despite its founders trying
to buy it back: [https://skift.com/2020/01/14/hipmunk-co-founders-spurned-
by-...](https://skift.com/2020/01/14/hipmunk-co-founders-spurned-by-sap-
concur-in-attempt-to-buy-back-the-company/)

I remember being pretty amazed by its UI back when it launched, but
unfortunately has fallen off the last few years.

Flights are hard, and it's why we're staying away from flights at first for my
travel startup Wanderium (wanderium.com). Instead we're focusing first on the
"long tail" of travel issues: visas, vaccinations, safety, local customs,
infrastructure, etc. By aggregating all of this data in a single place and
presenting them in a single, personalized experience we think it can save
travelers many hours per trip.

Check out our beta if you're curious:
[https://www.wanderium.com](https://www.wanderium.com)

------
cbright
"Any time a company gets acquired, there are always concerns about what it
means for the company and product. Here are some things to know:

1\. Hipmunk isn’t going anywhere"

-Adam Goldstein, October 3, 2016

~~~
jf22
I don't think it is reasonable to expect a promise like this to be kept three
years later.

~~~
toyg
Two-three years is actually the optimal time frame to kill an acquired
company, in my view, at least for big conglomerates. You avoid excessive
brain-drain at the start by declaring far and wide that it will be “business
as usual”; this way any useful know-how handover can happen smoothly, and you
get a chance to identify the best bits you will eventually salvage. After a
couple of years, you’ve likely cannibalized what was worth, the golden-
handcuffed talent has either left or was moved to more critical areas, and the
rest is just a legacy shell.

------
abvdasker
Excited to see that Hipmunk is now a strong candidate for Our Incredible
Journey
([https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com](https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com))!

------
bradleyjg
Did all the people at Hipmunk immediately quit? If not how come SAP Concur
(TM) 's web interface still looks, works, and feels like something out of the
IE6 era?

~~~
starky
Exactly my question when I learned through this post that Hipmunk is owned by
Concur. The Concur flight search is the worst I've ever used. It feels like
you have a better chance at winning the lottery than Concur's search actually
showing you the flight that you want to take (that I already found on another
website (usually Hipmunk)).

------
tempsy
the holy grail of travel search engines is one that include award availability
(+ amount) across all carriers

------
rileytg
hipmunk of old will be missed... i traveled all over the world with the intel
they provided on cheap flights

------
sdotsen
so much for "Hipmunk isn’t going anywhere"

------
artursapek
RIP. I wonder what happened. I guess it just doesn't make money?

~~~
jonwachob91
The article says it all. Their parent company came up with a different way to
do corporate travel solutions...

~~~
domador
Or its boring, corporate parent got bored of its fun, little, upstart adopted
child. I can't read press releases of this kind without thinking "soulless
corporate decision based just on money". Maybe Hipmunk was making $$ but the
corporate parent wanted it to make $$$.

Too bad. Hipmunk had a lovely UI and was very useful. I hate how acquisitions
(and acquihires in particular) cannibalize and destroy awesome little
products.

------
kick
For people who don't know why this is relevant to HN: Hipmunk (YC S10) was co-
founded by Steve Huffman as a rebound from reddit (YC S05), and got sold to
Concur a few years ago.

~~~
anonu
I'm sorry. It's relevant to hn beyond the fact that it's a YC alum that
coufounded it...

~~~
kick
Not really. It's a flight-booking company. If Kayak or something got closed,
it'd be deemed off-topic for HN. Kayak and Hipmunk do virtually the same
thing. The difference? One was by a YC founder, the other has T.V.
commercials.

~~~
schimmy_changa
I disagree - it was a really great product, something to be emulated. When it
came out, there was nothing like it, and it truly felt like a step change
compared to the existing sites. It was not quite the same impact, but felt
like a shadow of the feeling when you first used Google instead of Altavista.

One thing the HN community values is really good, well-executed products, and
it's instructive to learn what killed this great one. I'm sorry to see that it
was mostly antitrust shenanigans and competitors catching up
(flights.google.com is very good now) that made the gap between Hipmunk and
others fade.

Hipmunk however has made searching for flights better than if it had never
existed at all, and I am thankful for that. I still don't think the UI of
Google flights is quite as good as it TBH.

~~~
kick
I think this is a fair and balanced argument. I'm not entirely sure if I agree
with it, but you make a good point. This has definitely swayed me a bit.

------
tolmasky
Is anyone else seeing the strange lack of spaces? Multiple words throughout
the blog post show up concatenated for me, so it seems like a weird
transmission bug, not one typo.

~~~
baddox
The HTML markup is very strange. There are a bunch of spans around various
characters, words, and sequences of words, and sometimes there are non-
breaking spaces in seemingly random spots. Chrome and iOS Safari both seem
confused about how to render the text and how to handle "word" selection (i.e.
double-clicking).

My guess would be this is the output of some web-based rich text editor from
the blog engine or CMS. Or it could be some sort of obfuscation system to
circumvent adblockers or prevent scraping, although that doesn't make a lot of
sense in this context.

~~~
fareesh
Someone probably copied and pasted from somewhere into a JS rich text editor
that converted it into html.

------
sanj
What’s going on with the missing spaces in that article?

“ the decision to retire the Hipmunk product. ”

If there isn’t even anyone left to do minimal copy proofing, perhaps it is
time to shut down.

