Am I the only one that thinks "Ugh, not making money yet"?
Yes yes, I know about burning cash (err, growing) as fast as possible to lock down winner-take-all markets, but travel booking doesn't seem like one of those. There doesn't seem to be any switching cost other than typing a different url in the browser. I don't see any network effects. Am I missing something?
This is a business with revenue streams and cash flow. They've been around for two years. They've already raised more than $5mm. When I hear "we raised another venture round" my gut reaction is concern, not congratulations.
As far as the product goes: The UX is nice. But every time I tried hipmonk, the prices were higher than what I found elsewhere, so I stopped using it.
> But every time I tried hipmonk, the prices were higher than what I found elsewhere, so I stopped using it.
Same here, love the UX but when I first tried it a couple of years ago, prices were higher. I tried it again only a couple of weeks ago and prices were still much higher. It looks like hipmunk is an engineer driven company focused on technical stuff (great UX, no ads) but what's important here is getting the best deals with flights providers and they're still not there yet, even two years after the launch.
Are they actually higher though? I found the same thing you did, except when I tried checking out of the other places I found they would place fees on top of things. Turns out Hipmonk just adds those fees in from the start. In my experience they end up coming out the same.
> every time I tried hipmonk, the prices were higher than what I found elsewhere
Can you be more specific? We (Hipmunk) get our data from the same places that most everyone does, fares aren't really something that's variable from site-to-site (Southwest aside)
The only thing I can think of is that we list fares after taxes and fees, and many other sites list fares before them
Actually, most aggregators that I've used (hotwire, priceline, etc) all include taxes and fees so I'm not sure what you're referring to here.
I think the purpose of Hipmunk (and what makes it different) is that it takes more things into account than price, right? You prioritize flights that have the most optimal times with the best price, am I correct? I found they were most similar when you selected price as your priority when looking flights.
If anything, a feature I think I'd enjoy would be a fare predictor because most aggregators to have this feature and it's nice to know when you should buy.
People expect the before taxes fee, because most seem to do this. Yesterday I booked a hotel on Orbitz via Hipmunk (I like the map view btw). There was roughly $10 price difference, i.e. Hipmunk was showing $X but after clicking on the link, on the Orbitz site it was showing $X-$10. It's a nice surprise, but I wonder how many didn't bother to check...
For some reason Hipmonk isn't finding the $179 United flights. That $179 includes taxes and fees.
In addition, Hipmonk's flexible search is far more limited than Kayak's. Hipmonk allows +2 days for a total of 3 possible. Kayak searches +/- 3 days, for a total of 7. Also Kayak has the "nearby airports" feature which often drops the price even further (Louisville is $149) - especially in the Bay Area where SFO and OAK are both a bart ride away.
> Hipmonk allows +2 days for a total of 3 possible. Kayak searches +/- 3 days, for a total of 7.
Actually you can change that text field to say "+-3". We're both using the same feature of our mutual data provider ITA. And if you search for the same day this way, you get the same fares on both sites.
> Also Kayak has the "nearby airports" feature which often drops the price even further (Louisville is $149) - especially in the Bay Area where SFO and OAK are both a bart ride away
We do that automatically when you give us a city name (like "San Francisco" vs "SFO"). You can also just add comma-separated airports if you know the codes.
I don't pretend our UI exposes these the best, but we really are getting the same data from the same companies.
Actually you can change that text field to say "+-3".
Wow, that is a totally hidden feature. Even worse, if you click the + button, it tops out at +2 and then greys out. Same with the - button and -2. My offhand suggestion is 3 buttons: plus adds days after, minus adds days before, and a third that resets to day-of only.
We do that automatically when you give us a city name (like "San Francisco" vs "SFO").
Also a completely hidden feature. You can probably help mitigate that by putting "San Francisco, CA (and nearby airports)" in the dropdown list.
You're alienating all of the flexible-dates travelers right on the first page... seems like you might get a lot of immediate result out of just fixing these usability issues.
I notice the missing $179 United fare now shows up. What was up with that? Bug?
FWIW, now that I know how this works (and assuming the price issues are taken care of), I will use himpunk for my next flight.
You have many different types of customers, don't worry...
I booked last minute flight to SFO 2 days before Fluent Conf through Hipmunk. I was glad to get the perfect flight schedule and the whole experience took less than 15 minutes.
Loved the UI, didn't matter even if I ended up paying more.
I think I'm in the minority but I can't stand Hipmunk's UI. With Kayak I just put in when I'm going, time of day I want to leave and hit the nonstop button. Then I get a nice ordered list by price boom done.
Maybe I'm spoiled I live near two major airports (Oakland and SFO) and tend to travel to large cities. But I've not found hipmunk's UI innovation to be anything but excess nonsense I don't need.
I'm the opposite, I absolutely despise Kayak's UI and how it explodes for anything but the simplest itineraries (and even then it's a pain).
For one thing, Kayak doesn't let you pick your departure and return legs separately, and instead displays every possible permutation of flights that fit your search criteria. I remember seeing over a thousand "results" for SFO-JFK. How a user is expected to make a decision there... your guess is as good as mine.
The number of "results" explode even further for any flight with possible connections.
Also, the arbitrary filters that one needs to chop the result set down to something mentally digestible are also highly flawed. When I fly is important to me, but if I say, restrict the results to "departs before 11am", it will filter out something that leaves at 11:05am. The more "analog" view of Hipmunk is greatly preferable.
All that said, I'm cautiously hopeful for Hipmunk. I love their UX, but building a business around something that has infamously low margins (like, incredibly, razor thin margins) seems like a questionable strategy. I can see why Hipmunk has expanded into hotel bookings (though IMO it's not very good), but one has to wonder about the viability of its core product.
> but if I say, restrict the results to "departs before 11am", it will filter out something that leaves at 11:05am.
What is wrong with that :)? Set the threshold to 12PM if the 11:05 flight is OK with you.
Hipmunk confuses me because I have to do the back and forth dance between the two legs to find the price/time optimum point. I can zero in on a solution much faster with Kayak's depart/arrive filters.
> "Set the threshold to 12PM if the 11:05 flight is OK with you"
But the 11:55am flight is not OK. In any case, this is breaking what users have to do now - they have to purposely break the UI to get the results they need. They have to lie to the system to coerce out the answers they actually want, as opposed to the system being smart about it.
When I say "leave at 11am", I mean "the closer to 11 the better", not "place a hard limit".
Not to mention, Kayak's results display is terrible - the information is densely packed and not in an easily parseable way, making flight comparisons a gigantic chore. If I want to compare my departure times, it stuffs the return trip (which frankly, has no business being there) times right underneath.
It also insists on showing raw time values, without any visual indication of longer flights vs. shorter flights, nor visual indication that differentiates departure/landing times. This is only a couple notches above comparing UNIX timestamps. Manually, consciously subtracting time values is not something people are good at, and certainly humans perform poorly at it when forced to do it many times in short order.
It is, in short, needlessly precise. It doesn't matter if one flight leaves at 6:05am and the other leaves at 6:08am. I don't need that kind of precision in my decision-making process. Nor do I need to know if one flight is 8 minutes longer than the other. It's noise, and it's poor UX.
Nowadays I go out of my way to avoid Kayak - or really anyone who fails to separate the two legs of a trip. It's ugly, it's information overload, and it's downright maddening.
Wow all things you've listed is what I love about Kayak. It is fascinating that a simple task such as flight search can lead to such fragmented user preferences.
You're right that the hipmunk UI may be overkill for your use-case of simple point-to-point flights, but I wonder how much of the market that represents?
That said, reducing the complexity of the UI for that usecase might be a way to increase adoption.
NB I do a lot of complicated travel, and hipmunk found me a fare that saved me $1800! I use ITA matrix, KVSTool, etc, and oddly enough it didn't show up there.
One thing that Kayak is doing better than Hipmunk is multi-airport things. I.e. We have here in Silicon Valley SFO and SJC. I usually prefer SJC, but can fly from SFO too. Some flights are cheaper or have less connections if you depart from SJC but arrive to SFO, or vice versa. I couldn't find how to tell Hipmunk that it is OK (or not OK) to use different airports for round-trip. Kayak does it very nicely. It also seems pretty hard to say "I like these dates but wouldn't mind to go day earlier-later if that gets me couple of hundreds of dollars back".
When I search for flights home (Boston) from Santa Clara, I usually do a search for "SFO,SJC" to "BOS". This shows me all flights from SFO and SJC to BOS allowing me to pick and choose which flights work for me (time wise) as well as what makes the most sense price wise.
As for the multi-dates, when you select a date, you can click the "+/-" buttons to add time to your query. You can also manually add "+-n" to your date to give a range.
So, say I was open to flying out July 12, 13 (original), or 14 - I could update my date to look like: "Jul 13 -+1"
Actually, I just tried something today. I was looking for fares to the SF Bay area (OAK, SFO or SJC) and Kayak found fares(with taxes) that were 30 dollars cheaper. Flexible search isn't easy with the current Hipmunk UI.
Are you sure? I originally thought the same thing but Hipmunk simply includes all the taxes and fees in the price they display, so it almost always ends up the same for me when checking out.
I always feel hipmunk has the most expensive prices out of any other airline search engine. They might do it differently, which I like, but their prices seem higher than any other site.
I also love what priceline offers, their price negotiator!!! It always hits well below what the prices of airlines currently offer. Any plans to put this in the future of hipmunk?
Searching for flights sucks, hard. Fixing it with a better ui is a great thing. But ultimately we're experiencing that pain in large part trying to get the best prices. I search for flights about twice a year. Usually between two not-a-hub destinations (currently dublin-tel aviv) so its even harder. Every time I have to do it, I wish that things have improved. They haven't.
Basically, I:
- Go to 3-4 engines or portals. Try to figure out all the airline flying that routes. See who flies where.
- Go to the airlines' sites directly, see if they prices are better (usually they are). Try to remember which airlines (RyanAir) never have fares listed on aggregators. Fill out captchas and tick on boxes to be let in.
- See what the prices are for the most expensive leg & try to put together my own route using two separately bought tickets.
- Try to think of some more exotic routes: change airports in London, fly through a Greek resort island, whatever.
- Call a travel agent to see if they can do better.
I might not get all the way down this list.When I do, I rarely see the same fare twice. When I lived in Australia the stakes were higher and I always went down the whole horrible list. I hate doing this. I'd pay good money to avoid it. But, for my use case UI crappiness isn't the issue(even though doing your grocery shopping on Ebay in 1998 would be a better experience). The problem is centralizing all the available fares onto one site.
Just as an experiment, I tried looking for a trip on hipmunk that I have booked for 10 days from now. Prices start arund $1000 per leg, about 250% higher than what I paid (coincidentally for the same flight).
Slight tangent: You can get these flights (dublin-tel aviv) for around $600-$900 round trip if you're reasonably early and flexible. Why does hipmunk even offer me a $7500 leg that takes 24hr and fly through Toronto? Shouldn't their agony detector realize that no sane person would want this? Isn't good UI also removing useless information? If they want to demonstrate how thorough they are (also important) aren't there easier ways?
I don't mean to be picking on hipmunk. They're obviously dedicated to good user experience and they do a great job of presenting the large amount of information one needs to process in order to book a flight. If any Hipmunk people are reading please take any snarkiness as a cry for help. I really do want a better experience booking flights I'm looking to you guys for them.
Just as an experiment, I tried looking for a trip on hipmunk that I have booked for 10 days from now. Prices start arund $1000 per leg, about 250% higher than what I paid (coincidentally for the same flight).
That's a terrible experiment, fares almost always go up as you get closer to the departure date. If you want to do that, check the same thing on the airline's own site.
In my experience hipmunk isn't more expensive than any other site. In fact, every site will quote you the same darn price for the same darn flight, because airline fares are a lot more formalized than most people seem to be assuming.
You're absolutely right on this! It's the biggest pain in travel: fluctuating prices. All OTA's (online travel agents) have the exact same price (excluding deals) so you're scrambling around searching a futile objective. 85/90% of us at the time of about to press 'book it' decide to check elsewhere; 42% of us spend 4 weeks hunting travel; 52% of us look at 4+ websites. It's a total pain. Which is why we created www.mytab.co - directly with this in mind. By saving travel cash &/or having friends contribute to your trip, you're now not focusing on the price at the time of booking because you're cash rich (it's like monopoly money) and a happier booking experience. AND since we run a gift card platform, we can negotiate exclusive deals on your behalf. For the first time ever, the customer will be empowered yet this is also amazing for the travel industry who can now stabilize their slow time/long lead bookings. We created myTab for people like you who never have a decent search/book experience :)
Is "better design" or the agony feature really a sustainable competitive advantage? You're clearly on to something, but why can't someone just copy what you have?
When competition makes more than half of their revenue from ads, shutting off that revenue source by copying that UX and striking out pages of advertisements isn't very economically viable.
I have feature suggestions for hipmunk. I really hope you, or some other flights search site brings these two things:
1. Find cheapest flights between two countries (country->city, city->country, country->country). Some people don't mind traveling a little just to reach the airport from where they can find cheaper flights.
2. Bypass stopovers which levy transit visa. You can easily find my location so you can identify places where I will need to get transit visa even for stopovers and give me option to ignore flights with those stopovers.
> 1. Find cheapest flights between two countries (country->city, city->country, country->country). Some people don't mind traveling a little just to reach the airport from where they can find cheaper flights.
I recommend asking about how important a role his bizdev played in prep for launching the site as well as signing on partners thereafter. The amount of hustle it took to get us in the door with OTAs/airlines at first is not something I see in many of my startups.
Heh. I did none of the bizdev, which really made the difference with getting hipmunk off the ground (and is a unique startup proposition). If you wanna know about my marketing/PR brandbuilding, just watch my class on Making Something People Love: http://generalassemb.ly/start/fundamentals-of-entrepreneursh...
Emmett Shear of Twitch just suggested the same thing. Thanks Alexis. I think I'll make this the focus of the interview, and ask the other questions posted here towards the end of the conversation.
It's exciting, though, because hipmunk's story shows that even more resistant industries are capable of being "hipmunked" by tenacious, smart recent-college-grads with no industry connections.
It would be a slight break from your usual dig-into-the-growth-of-the-business questions, but I'd love to hear about some of the reasons (or his thought on) why the market for flights are as insanely complicated as they are. Those kinds of understandings are surely a big part of what you need to succeed here.
Great question Andrew! I'd love to hear him explain:
why one way flights are often as expensive as round trips, his thoughts on couchsourced flight searching (flightfox.com, current YC batch), their monetization plans, while it is so hard to get the best priced tickets
Can someone explain how do these free flight search engines make money?
In my case I search using Kayak, but never really book the ticket from Kayak (don't follow their link to the airline). I go directly to the airline site and book it there. Many people I know do the same. I despise using Orbitz/Priceline other than just a cursory glance to see if there are cheaper tickets.
I know that sometimes an itinerary involves multiple airlines and that is when there might be an advantage booking through, say Orbitz, but even in those cases I just book separate tickets.
Why is this free search/booking industry still unsaturated and is there really a demand for such capital infusion?
Update: My question is specific to flight search, because I think hotel search can be profitable model as sometimes these sites provide better rates than the hotel's site.
"In my case I search using Kayak, but never really book the ticket from Kayak."
A lot of people do book from Kayak just because it's easier. So, don't assume you are the typical customer here. Also, I am not familiar with Hipmunk's numbers but I believe that hotel search is the real revenue generator for these sites, and flight search just acts to get people in the door.
True, I think logic suggests most people find it convenient to just click the result link on Kayak, which has made it so easy compared to Oribts, which has its own booking engine. So I am guessing they just make a very small percentage of the sale just for referring.
If as you say the hotel search is the real deal, it makes sense. Which leads me to the next thought, wonder why hotels haven't caught up with the airline industry in having a fairly realistic price listing on their own site? In fact, most of the times I am ok just booking using priceline bidding for hotels.
wonder why hotels haven't caught up with the airline industry in having a fairly realistic price listing on their own site?
What do you mean? Most hotels nowadays give you exactly the same price on their site as you'd get from orbitz/expedia/hipmunk.
If you mean a price list rather than a get-a-quote-for-a-particular-day, then that's not in their interests (they don't really want you to know how much they're gouging you on busy nights), but it's been a fair while since I stayed in a hotel which didn't have a price search thing on their site.
Priceline and hotwire are, of course, always cheaper than getting a named hotel, if you're clever about it.
I have to say, though, if hotel search is the real cash cow (as I suspect it is) then I think hipmunk should spend some more time working on it. Their interface for flight search is the greatest, and I use it all the time. But the hotel search I find to be confusing and clunky so I rarely use it.
It's really such a high value traffic area that you can be monetising traffic, especially if you're not looking to squeeze the last drop of money, is pretty easy.
I find that the ITA iOS app from http://itasoftware.com/ (Google owned) consistently brings me the best prices and then I book direct through the airlines website.
Congrats to Adam and the whole team at Hipmunk. It's always great to see investments into travel startups, it's a big space in need of lots of innovation.
Yes yes, I know about burning cash (err, growing) as fast as possible to lock down winner-take-all markets, but travel booking doesn't seem like one of those. There doesn't seem to be any switching cost other than typing a different url in the browser. I don't see any network effects. Am I missing something?
This is a business with revenue streams and cash flow. They've been around for two years. They've already raised more than $5mm. When I hear "we raised another venture round" my gut reaction is concern, not congratulations.
As far as the product goes: The UX is nice. But every time I tried hipmonk, the prices were higher than what I found elsewhere, so I stopped using it.