
Hipmunk (YC S10) Acquired by Concur - jasonwilk
https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/13/concur-buys-hipmunk-to-add-search-to-its-travel-and-expense-management-platform/
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kylecordes
Hipmunk has been an excellent flight search tool, the best I have found as of
a few years ago. Shockingly better than most of the rest of them back when it
started, in terms of being able to understand and choose among numerous
choices.

Unfortunately, that was then and this is now. Several of the airlines have
dropped out of participating in flight comparison sites, and those that do
apparently pay staggeringly little per referral. This is greatly eroded the
usefulness of Hipmunk and similar sites, and taken away the motivation for
anyone to pressure airlines to participate. Why bother when the most you can
win is a tiny sliver?

I wish there is a way to simply pay a little money to get a comprehensive high
quality comparison of all available flights from all airlines. I don't want
AI, I don't want a travel agent to do it for me. I most definitely don't want
to visit multiple airline websites and try to manually compare the offerings.
I just want to see all of the different ways to get from point A to point B,
in a well engineered graphical representation, all at once so I can quickly
and effectively choose the best fit. I would love if there was a way to simply
pay some dollars to do so.

~~~
rebelidealist
What is the best flight search these days?

~~~
joelrunyon
Google flights or matrix.itasoftware.com (you can't book here though)

~~~
blahshaw
Google Flights is simply a pretty UI around matrix.itasoftware.com, no?

~~~
wxs
The matrix has nice features like flexible dates on a multi-leg trip that
Google Flights doesn't offer.

~~~
mbesto
Google Flights has gradually added ITA Matrix stuff over time.

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alberth
Anyone have insight into the sale price?

Hipmunk raised $55M over 7 rounds [1] and had 51 employees [2].

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

[2] [https://www.hipmunk.com/about](https://www.hipmunk.com/about)

~~~
benjaminRRR
My guess is that, given it has not been disclosed, the investors got as much
of their money back as they could through liquidation preferences and there's
not much to get excited about after that.

~~~
dexterdog
The employees are probably (mostly) getting to keep their jobs.

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exelius
Concur's core product is shockingly awful. My company recently switched to it,
and I don't know anyone who actually uses it. Most of us have figured out we
get lower prices and less hassle by just ordering directly from the airlines /
hotels and booking them to or corporate credit cards. If you're in a hurry, we
can just call AmEx travel and pay $30 for them to book the trip for us using
their travel agent terminals -- which of course have every flight from every
airline. The end result is usually that we pay more for our travel and our
company loses control; but honestly Concur's application crashes 90% of the
time I try to use it with JavaScript errors, so I'm not sure it's really a
viable solution in the first place.

The problem, of course, is the commoditization of the airline industry.
Leisure travelers are, at this point, loss leaders that fill empty seats for
their real business: consultants and sales people who travel 50-100+ flights a
year. The industry is overly reliant on an increasingly shrinking segment of
business travelers who fly on higher-fare tickets and often on short notice,
so it does everything it can to make that kind of travel very painful UNLESS
you do it all with a single airline and use full-fare tickets. If you thought
air travel was unbearable on your last vacation, imagine how bad it is to do
that 3 or 4 times a week -- so you try to consolidate to get a few perks like
early boarding, lounge access or first class upgrades ( _nobody_ pays for
domestic first class -- they're almost always loyalty upgrades).

So the real problem is that the airlines don't care at all about your $200
flight to Tampa to visit granny. They have to fill the seats to pay off the
leases on the airplanes, but they make almost zero margin off of you because
leisure travelers are so price-conscious. Business travelers are willing to
pay an extra $300 for the ability to cancel their ticket on short notice, and
often carry less baggage and cost less to serve. So the airlines try to lock
in those types of customers with loyalty programs (which are so scaled back as
to be nearly worthless unless you fly over 125 segments a year -- roughly 3
flights a week, every week of the year that's not a holiday), by making it
harder to comparison shop, etc. and screw the little guys.

~~~
pnathan
Concur is quite possibly one of the worst UI's I've ever used, right up there
with IBM Rational Atria ClearQuest or IBM Lotus Notes.

~~~
blahshaw
I have no idea what Rational Atria ClearQuest but the name alone tells me it's
awful.

~~~
vecinu
I used to use Clearquest when I worked for a bank to hook up to their DB2 and
Oracle databases. It was HORRID.

I got to use it with their own homebaked IDE, Rational Developer and VCS,
called Rational Clearcase.

I look back at those years and still get shivers down my spine.

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nilkn
Hipmunk and Google Flights are my two go-to tools these days for beginning the
search for flight tickets. I use Hipmunk when I know where I want to go and
when, and I use Google Flights when I know I want to take a trip, but I'm
flexible about both when and where.

~~~
hentrep
I haven't used Google Flights -- will check it out -- but have taken a similar
approach with Skyscanner.com. Basically, if I want to filter a trip based on
price without regard to location or travel date. Really fun to play with!

~~~
stevesearer
Kayak has a nice tool for that too:
[https://www.kayak.com/explore](https://www.kayak.com/explore)

Pretty amazing to find flights to Europe from LAX for under $500 for many
destinations in Europe and Asia. Sub-$400 for some destinations too

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dlevine
Congrats to the Hipmunk team! I've been using Hipmunk since the beginning, and
have found it to be a pleasant way to search for flights. They obviously care
a lot about creating a good experience for the customer, which is a lot more
than I can say about the big travel sites.

I hope that the team had a nice exit, and that they continue to develop
Hipmunk within Concur.

~~~
20yrs_no_equity
Unless tech crunch got things very wrong, they didn't.

The investors will get a base hit, the employees, nothing.

~~~
JonFish85
I bet the investors did OK. Some employees might get a nice retention package,
but they'll have to sign a document stating their stock/options are now worth
$0, so they can take or leave the retention deal.

The founders probably did OK, but they might have the same type of deal ($0
for their stock, except their retention is probably orders of magnitude better
than any employee's).

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mmanfrin
Concur feels like an odd company to acquire them, but maybe it's to streamline
business travel?

Also -- I recently used Hipmunk (been using it for a few years now), but found
that it didn't find deals that _Chase 's rewards portal_ found, which I
thought was terribly odd (why would a rewards portal find better deals?).

~~~
calbear81
The difference is Hipmunk is a metasearch site and relies on the connectivity
it gets from travel agencies and airlines directly to power their price feeds
and then you book with an agency/airline directly. Chase rewards portal is
probably acting as a booking agent so may have access to prices/itineraries
that are not found on metasearch sites.

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pcurve
what a shame... I've always loved Hipmunk and its "sort by agony" filter. I
have to use Concur at work and I think it's pretty rubbish.

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chx
The killer feature of Hipmunk for some of us is the ability to understand some
of the ITA Matrix codes and so it's one of the platforms to book an
interesting itinerary put together on the Matrix. (If you are interested in
this, there is an up-and-coming service which tries to do same called
bookwithmatrix and there's a userscript maintained on flyertalk adding booking
links to the ITA Matrix itself.)

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trustfundbaby
Does this mean Hipmunk (the site) will eventually be going away?

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koolba
Hipmunk was cool when it first came out but I haven't used anything besides
Google flight search in years. The speed of the interface alone justifies it.

It's either that or book directly from the site if it involves doing something
special (ex: award travel).

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peteretep
Their business class search has been broken for months, and they didn't care.
Feels like they were on the way out.

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tiatia
A flight search engine that I would be interested in:

The craziest routing.

Instead flying for USD 700 A->Destination or A->B>Destination Fly
A->C>D>E>F>G>Destination

~~~
dboreham
Airlines typically don't allow that (unless you buy one-way segments between
those nodes).

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joeguilmette
Concur bought Tripit, which is now in the middle of a bit of a drawn out
redesign. They didn't destroy that lovely product, so I have hopes!

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aeijdenberg
Congrats to Adam, Steve and team! Flight search is a tough industry to break
into, and they did a great job against the odds to get there.

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raldi
Congratulations!

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milesward
Congrats Hipmunk homies!

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dmoney67
Congrats guys, I'm so happy the product will live on.

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20yrs_no_equity
My sincere condolences to all the option holding employees of Hipmunk who will
not likely get back what they gave up in salary (due to liquidation
preferences and the like, they will be lucky if they get anything, other than
golden handcuffs.)

20 years and no equity has taught me that next time I do a start up, I want
restricted stock, not options, with an exercise price of $0.01. Or founder
stock. In fact, I think the only way to do a startup is a founder (unless
you're just starting out.)

~~~
SeeDave
I sense righteous bitterness in this post, understand that your life
experiences actually happened and respect you enough to come to the conclusion
that your response is completely and totally legitimate. Are you comfortable
with sharing your life/entrepreneurship story as a HN, reddit, Medium, etc.
post or reply to this comment? If not to "get it off your chest" and "move on"
so much as to protect others?

~~~
20yrs_no_equity
Thanks. I am doing that, a bit at a time. I'm not actually bitter, though I
think I seem bitter. I am maybe cynical. (maybe they mean the same thing in
practice.) But I'm doing well, and I'm not slowing down, I've just seen
startup employees get a raw deal way too many times and think the entire
"startup culture" is oriented in a way that screws over employees,
particularly engineers (without whom software cannot be made. While other
functions are absolutely critical too, that doesn't mean the people in those
other functions should work 30 hour weeks, and take home most of the payday.)

One of the reasons I'm not bitter is that the VC industry is dying. IT's not
obvious yet, but like the headphone jack, its days are numbered.

