
Reddit CoFounder Dips Back Into YC With Travel Startup Hipmunk (YC S10) - icey
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/17/reddit-cofounder-dips-back-into-y-combinator-with-travel-startup-hipmunk/
======
wheels
What I've always wanted is _travel_ booking, not _flight_ booking. I want to
know how long, how much and what my options are for getting from $x to $y at
$z time.

This still drives me nuts. If I'm at home in Berlin and have a meeting in in
central London, I don't want to have to figure out that if I fly from one of
the two airports in Berlin to one of the four airports around London that I'll
have to use these kinds of busses and trains or taxis or rent a car and have
to sort all of that out myself.

I want to know how to get there door to door, and I'll pay a decent premium to
have it all put in front of me where I can buy my tickets all in one go. I
hate travel booking because it seems to be without fail a minimum 2 hour
exercise sorting out the options and picking one.

Back in the day I had a go-to travel agent for such. Unfortunately finding a
good travel agent often requires checking out 10-15 of them and I've been too
lazy for that as well since recent moves.

Blog post on this a while back: [http://scotchi.net/2009/09/what-i-hate-about-
booking-travel-...](http://scotchi.net/2009/09/what-i-hate-about-booking-
travel-online/)

~~~
christonog
What kind of premium would you (or the average traveler) be willing to pay for
a travel agent replacement webapp? I've been thinking about this as well while
working on my own travel based project. Perhaps this is an opportunity for me
to pivot in the future, if need be.

~~~
wheels
10% is my gut feeling. I'd imagine that the plan of attack would be figuring
out the top 10 or so most important cities and working out the details for
them (airport transportation, transit, car rental, taxi rates) and going from
there.

As to loumf's concern, once I trusted the site (say, after getting one booking
commission free), I'd have no problem with the details not being revealed to
me as to flight numbers / lines, details of public transit, etc. until I'd
purchased. But I'm not sure you'd need that if the commissions are reasonable;
I'm willing to pay to have my planning simplified.

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shimon
Not to knock Hipmunk, but this visualization has been available for years as
the "graphical view" of ITA Software's matrix demo app:

<http://matrix1.itasoftware.com/>

Do a search and then View Flights - Graphical. It's excellent and has been my
preferred way to find flights for ages.

It's nice to see that someone who might actually care about marketing is
offering the same useful tool!

~~~
alec
(I work at ITA on the QPX flight search engine).

The new Matrix (<http://matrix.itasoftware.com/>) has the color bar
functionality, too, but looks a littler friendlier! When you search, click
"time bars" on the right below the carrier matrix. It was one of the most-
requested features.

~~~
StavrosK
Please answer me this:

Why did I not know of this website? You don't even seem to have a front page,
on the link another person posted, yet when I tried your link it is easily and
by _far_ the best fare search engine I've seen. All the others are bloated,
slow and plastered with ads.

Who has been doing your marketing?

~~~
aditya
Because ITA doesn't care, they power the back-end of a lot of big players (eg.
Orbitz) and they use some serious tech (which is why GOOG bought them), they
don't really care about the consumer market and don't really want to play
there. Makes sense to me.

~~~
StavrosK
Oh, I see, I didn't know that, thank you.

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jackowayed
I really like the visualization and the sorting by "agony", but there's a few
features Kayak has that are must-haves in my mind:

* Flexible dates. Sometimes I have a day or 2 of leeway, and it's often a lot cheaper to fly one day different.

* Flexible airports. I live roughly equidistant from 2 airports, and Stanford also has 2 reasonable airports to use.

~~~
scommab
It's not amazingly obvious, but you can do flexible airports by putting in an
area code or city that is between airports in to/from fields. i.e. if you do
from:"palo alto" to:"salt lake", it will show flights leaving both SFO and SJC
that go to SLC.

Something else interesting I noticed is that it seems to also return results
for Amtrak.

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seiji
What does it take to get the airline price and schedule data?

I imagine a lot of people _want_ to make sites like this, but they don't have
the resources to obtain contracts for data feeds.

Much like many people would like to open up streaming sites for Big Label
music, but not everybody can afford to enter into contracts with music labels
then have hundreds of HDs full of wav files delivered to them.

We need someone to make a pay-per-taste brokered data market.

~~~
MichaelSalib
I gave a decent (well, at least a lengthy) answer to this question here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1473748>

Basically, getting the raw data is quite difficult, but once you have it, you
need to expend a really enormous quantity of engineering work into using that
data to get useful answers.

For example, ITA invented a language to describe taxes. That's because the tax
code changes all the time and is incredibly complex. There are fares which
different entities in the airline industry price differently due to tax code
ambiguities. The search problem is really very hard once you have the data.

Now, ITA software does offer their flight search engine as a service: you sign
a contract with them and issue queries and they send you responses. I don't
know how interested they are in cutting deals with really tiny startups, but
they might be amenable. You will of course have to pay in some fashion: maybe
a fixed fee per query or pay per compute time or pay per successful booking.

~~~
sabj
That's very illuminating. I have some ideas for displaying / managing flight
and travel information that I would really love to implement, but the "Data
Problem" has loomed large for experimentation. I didn't in fact realize that
it was even as burdensome as you describe.

~~~
jfno67
Just issue query to Orbitz via the affiliate API and they'll pay you for every
flight booked. The TOS have some limitation, but if you can work within them
you can explore pretty easily.

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samdk
This is wonderful. I will absolutely be using this the next time I want to
search for a flight. The logo makes me smile (although it's a bit indistinct
on a white background), and the fact that the default sort method is "agony"
makes me very happy.

It seems to be including Amtrak results in there too, which makes for a nice
comparison.

~~~
mrduncan
The logo was designed by (Reddit cofounder) Alexis Ohanian.

<http://twitter.com/kn0thing/status/21425755974>

~~~
clistctrl
oh hey thats pretty good. I wonder if I could get him to make a dingo for the
startup i'm working on :) haha

~~~
kn0thing
Thanks. After the reddit alien, then the breadpig, and now the hipmunk, I'm
really weary of pushing out a mascot of fail, so I'm pretty selective about
work I do :-/

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dabent
My notes:

\- "Hipmunk?" I don't get it. Why not tripmunk?

\- I like the visualization and the "agony" sort. Pretty cool

\- Is the plan to book the trip directly on the site eventually. Once I got to
the end, I thought "Why don't I just go to Orbitz next time if that's where I
end up anyway?"

~~~
rwhitman
Try finding an available domain name with the word "trip" at the beginning...

~~~
by
tripluckydip, tripyer, tripfingertip, tripunzip, trippirt. Hipmunk is good.

------
icey
Company site: <http://www.hipmunk.com/>

Crunchbase profile: <http://www.crunchbase.com/company/hipmunk>

Launch announcement: <http://blog.hipmunk.com/hipmunk-launches>

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ryanricard
I absolutely love the interface, especially:

-Sorting by "Agony" is a brilliant decision. It seems to take into account time spent traveling and cost, which leaves me with a few easy choices to make (spend 20 bucks more, save an hour) instead of a million tiny choices to make.

-I love that the prices seem to take into account taxes and fees without any trouble. I see $550 on Hipmonk, click "buy," and then see $550 on Orbitz.

-It looks nice and performs excellently.

I wonder if seeing data in this format will cause airlines to differently
optimize their fare schedule. Obviously I don't have the knowledge of the data
to answer this, but my gut feeling is that more people selecting flights based
on travel time might lead airlines to find ways to reduce travel time.
Wouldn't that be sweet.

------
Keyframe
First time I actually got relevant results for a search (a bit obscure
search). I don't have any need for tickets now, but when I do I'll certainly
use this.

Calendar for input of depart and return was a bit confusing at first.

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CitizenKane
I've been having to do a lot of airline searches recently and this should
definitely alleviate the pain. Being able to see the flight plans visually,
especially the layovers, is extremely nice. As is the automatic hiding of
flight itineraries that suck.

Being able to adjust the day would be a nice feature, would be cool to be able
to drag a time slot around to see if there is anything better a day later or a
day earlier. Perhaps being able to compare days side by side would be nice.

Overall though, it's pretty awesome. Only thing I've seen that comes close is
Kayak.

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ari_
Having looked at the interface, it's basically taking orbitz results and
slapping a slightly nicer GUI on it. If they were backended into ITA instead
of hopping via Orbitz that would be better.

What I would like to see is something that ITA has already, which is see
cheapest fares by month. I'd also love to see all the weird fares that
FlyerTalk people have. Also, US Centric sites: the pricing information for
inter europe or asia flights is dismal! Dismal!

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chime
Wow. That is seriously good. I've been planning a trip with my friends and the
table-view is absolutely superior to everything I've ever seen. Keep it up
Steve!

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yellowbkpk
> When you see the results (see screenshot for example), you’ll never want to
> see flight results in any other format. It’s one of those that’s so obvious
> why didn’t I think of that moments.

I disagree. I think there are several different groups of people that search
for flights and each of them wants to see their results in a different way. I
think the other flight search engines (especially Kayak) meet most of their
needs quite well. It's great to see another view into this data, but I don't
think it's the only way I will want to view it.

When I search for a flight, the only factor I care about is price. I don't
care when it leaves, how long it takes to get there, what airline it is: I
want it to be the cheapest it can possibly be. When prices are close, I'll
sometimes care about airline (I really on't like to fly AirTran for example).

I think Hipmunk's view into the data is perfect for someone that cares about
the time spent in flight, layovers and which part of the day they're flying.
These people are usually business-people who have money, so it's probably a
perfect market to shoot for :).

~~~
jackowayed
You know you can sort by price, right? Right at the top there's a "sort by".
And you might see that you only have to pay $5 more to avoid leaving at 6am
and not have a ridiculous layover.

~~~
seiji
My first time through I didn't notice the prices were listed on the page.

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fleaflicker
Why go through yc? Or raise a small angel round?

~~~
dabent
My guess is that it worked the first time, so why not try it again? That and
they may feel some loyalty to PG. Well, then there's the "instant post in
TechCrunch" one gets when combining YC with a successful prior exit. They are
bound to get lots of press and a running start going the YC route, especially
when combined with past experience.

~~~
pg
I'd _like_ to believe that it's because YC is actually beneficial. After all,
a new startup by a founder of Reddit was going to get lots of attention
regardless.

~~~
kscaldef
What do you think the benefits of YC are to a company started by previously
successful founders? (Honest question... seems like you have mostly touted the
connections you can broker, which I wouldn't think they need help with now.)

~~~
pg
Basically the same as for a first-time founder, which we explain here:
<http://ycombinator.com/about.html>

We've never claimed connections are the most important part. That's probably
the most common misconception about YC, and one we try actively to dispel,
among other places on the page linked to above.

------
davidw
Wow, very nicely done! This kind of thing is very important for international
travel, as they often give you some crazy travel proposals.

I tried VCE to PDX in October, and it seemed to do pretty well, although I'd
appreciate it if it gave me more information on how to get a cheaper flight,
if changing the dates would help at all.

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noahkagan
It's a bit confusing to figure out where this is better. I don't really grasp
the agony part. For flying the real challenges for me are not layovers but
planning the stuff out once you get there. Also, finding more local airplane
companies internationally..

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InfinityX0
So how are they driving traffic? They seem to have no SEO focus at all. When
you're relying solely on brand equity, you're doing yourself a strong
disservice.

Of course, that SEO part is going to be pretty expensive for them to compete
in the travel space.

~~~
loumf
I personally never start travel from search engines -- I go to a Expedia,
Orbitz, sometimes the airline directly (Southwest).

Traffic from brand can be better than traffic from SEO in some cases. You have
to spend money, but it's under your control.

~~~
_delirium
Travel-related queries of any sort are probably the one query I most shy away
from ever entering into a search engine. The results are just so filled with
garbage that it's rarely useful--- I'll go straight to a booking engine, to
Wikipedia, to Wikitravel, to Lonely Planet, or to some other known site to get
info, rather than deal with thousands of content-mill pages and resellers of
vacation packages.

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kasunh
Does he need to launch his second startup through yc? yc's most valued service
to a startup is right connections. Having been successful once he should
already have plenty of them

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margaretmit
The name at first struck me as odd, but it's growing on me the more I think
about it. As long as the chipmunk in the logo is really cute then it will be
memorable.

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weixiyen
I think this is the first homepage for a travel site I've seen that doesn't
hide the calendar picker. Whoever is designing this site knows what they are
doing.

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ashitvora
It seems, it searches only for domestic flights.

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omarchowdhury
There needs to be more guided direction on the landing page. Your users
shouldn't have to guess what to do.

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ashitvora
Is 15K not very less amount. I mean, I've never seen any company receiving
such a small amount in funding.

Is this normal?

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lzw
Really would like to hear how they got access to the data. Does Orbitz do
deals like this?

I've got a technology that I think would be applicable. Be happy to hand off
any booking to the data provider... but just need to be able to get to the raw
data.

This wouldn't compete with hipmunk, it is a different idea in the travel
space.

Just trying to find someone to supply data seems impossible.

