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?
Both Momondo and Google Flights are decent alternatives for finding good flights, although Hipmunk’s visualization feature is better than both.
Momondo had to monetize a little in the past year, and now includes a little bit of referral spam, but still produces good results, their sort by “best” feature is usually helpful!
Hi, I am one of the founders of Trabber, an independent travel metasearch website that we started back in 2005. You probably don't know about us because we are not very well known outside of Spain, where we started and are based, and because we are small and not linked to OTAs or travel groups. I would be very happy to get your feedback, thanks! https://www.trabber.com
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.
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.
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.
It's brutal because of lack of easy access to data, and more importantly, the ability to create bookings. IATA NDC API's should theoretically change this and get around the GDSs but I'm not holding my breath.
I've had a number of travel startup ideas but all were held back by access to data.
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.
Booking airfares pays almost nothing. When I worked at an OTA (now only a brand of someone else) 4 years ago I think we got $10 at most, likely even less today.
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?
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?
Lots of weirdness in travel these days. The last time I booked a flight on Delta (October) I found out that it can no longer handle cash payments at the airport. Not for anything. Not tickets, not baggage fees, not upgrades. Nothing.
They direct you to a place in the airport where you can guy a Visa gift card with cash and then pay for what you need from Delta.
I don't know if that's true of other carriers these days, or not.
DO NOT EVER buy a ticket with cash. It's silly since it's the nation's currency.
Yes, it is silly you can "avoid it" by other card methods. But at least theres a longer trail associated with that, and probably puts you at a lower risk of being labeled as a concern.
In the early 2000's (pre- and post-9/11) my wife had a job where she would 2-3 times a month get a phone call at 5am and then have to go to the airport and get on the next plane to whatever city was specified by her boss, take care of business, and then return at the end of the day. Paid for her ticket in cash, and her only luggage was her purse and her Palm Pilot (actually a Sony Clié UX50, which I remember because it was awesome).
She got pulled aside by security every single time for extra pat-downs and such. It got so frequent that they knew her by name, but they still went through the routine every single time.
She's very glad not to have that job anymore, but for other reasons.
I rarely need same day flights or even short notice flights unless they're for work (in which case they would book the flight for me using their travel agent). As a result I'm flexible with the airline and travel dates and usually have months in advance to shop. Typically I'll set up alerts on Hopper as soon as I know I'll be traveling, and that will tell me the right time to buy. I'll often also look at the budget airlines sites themselves as well because I know a lot of them don't allow aggregators.
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)
The flight was going to board in 20 minutes. I still needed to get through TSA, etc. I didn’t feel I could trust trying to book online vs. the person at the terminal in front of me.
That's an extremely niche transaction and when I'm waiting to check my bag I'm glad I don't have to wait for someone who can't use the website to try and book a trip. I can't believe you waited and were told to go to the website and decided to wait again just to make sure. What's wrong with united.com?
If it's through my usual airline I just book through the site or app, it takes a few seconds as they already have all of my information from pre-check to billing. Otherwise Google Flights is a great search interface and gives you a link to book directly through the airline.
Here’s exactly how it rolled out: I get a call, my wife has been taken to the hospital in nyc, and it’s a bad situation.
I look at google flights, see the upcoming flights, don’t book because I don’t know how long it will take to get to the airport.
Driving to the airport, I call Delta, almost book their flight until they casually mention it’s delayed 8 hours.
Call United, it’s a 30 minute wait to book a ticket.
I put my Tesla in auto steer and pull out the app. Fucking thing keeps reminding me to touch the steering wheel. Eventually the Tesla revokes my auto steer privileges for the rest of the drive. Thanks. A. Lot.
I scream into the airport, while talking to Amex travel. There’s an united flight boarding in 20 minutes. Amex tells me that due to the inherent delay in the online ticketing process, to buy my ticket at the airport.
And that’s why you might have someone who couldn’t use the website to book a trip.
They say you don’t know what the guy in front of you could be dealing with. I was that guy that day.
I called Amex back and they expedited the ticketing. United never called me back after I left my number earlier for their automated call back service for the 30 minute hold time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I know how HN works pretty well, I think, and I understand the front page pretty well, too. Hipmunk isn't intellectually interesting on its own, and plenty of companies in the flight space close down daily; they're rarely relevant to HN. This is a marketing post, filled with marketing speak, and contains no substance. Under no circumstance would this be counted as intellectually interesting were it posted by any non-YC company (or one of 'patio11's I guess) as tiny as Hipmunk is. A quilt company in a town close to me closed down a few years ago; they made yearly what Hipmunk was purchased for. Didn't see their press release on HN, and it wouldn't be relevant to HN.
Plaid's posts were third-party articles, and they got purchased for a billion. This is ad copy. Users would not have upvoted this, because it's not on-topic, were it by a non-YC company.
I didn't even intend to be implying relevancy was required on HN (my submission history is filled with articles that aren't relevant to much of anything) with the original comment; my statement was intended to give context. The second comment, though, was devil's advocacy that I'm still going to stand by: it's nothing but silly to act like ad copy is relevant to HN inherently.
> 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.
I'll admit I worded that poorly, intending for it to be qualified with "and marketing copy was posted to HN," however, I think that post is a poor example: being acquired for a billion is rare and newsworthy. A failed startup shutting down is not. Something like 96% of businesses close down.
Oh, is your point that YC-funded companies get more coverage on HN than non-YC-funded companies? And that this is bad?
There are many reasons why this could be the case, only one of which is naked self-interest on the part of YC to promote itself somehow. For example, it could also be correlative: YC funds interesting companies; HN covers interesting companies; thus you would expect that HN covers YC companies frequently.
Hipmunk was not just "a failed startup shutting down"; it was founded by a YC alum, as you note, but it was also design-focused with a distinct UX, good at PR, taking a somewhat combative approach in an industry popular on HN, etc., etc.
Most of that 96% of business do not have even one or two of those things?
> Oh, is your point that YC-funded companies get more coverage on HN than non-YC-funded companies? And that this is bad?
In a perfectly fair world, companies would get attention based on the value they are providing to society, not on the level of VC funding or particular affiliations.
In particular, labor rights, non-profits, legal technology, and governance are generally under-reported despite their larger potential impact on society, largely because they aren't attractive to VCs looking for out-sized returns on investment.
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, 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)
The interesting thing is the "Agony" sort has almost become standard! Skyscanner, Momondo, and others all default to a "Best" sort that takes into account flight length and prices.
Google Flights also does this for the first few results it returns, before returning a bunch of flights in price sort order.
Wanderlog looks very cool, but you might want to take a look at how you’re pulling your header images. Planning a trip to Vietnam and got welcomed a B/W header image of the Vietnam War :/
How’s PHP holding up in 2020? Are you using a big framework? Are you using it because it’s what you’ve always known or did you choose it deliberately over other options?
I’m genuinely curious. Not meant to be negative. I’ve always wondered how well PHP scaled for others.
We aren't using PHP for Wanderlog (which is built with Node.js), but did use it for many of our projects before 2015.
There really was (is?) no faster environment to get started with a single dynamic page that can submit a form and display data from a database. I don't have experience with the more recent frameworks, but I'm sure they're very mature now.
What alternatives exist to Hipmunk's display of flights? I've never seen a site with a similar display of flights by time, including display of the layovers, and easy ways to drag the earliest and latest start times to eliminate flights that aren't an option.
> ITA Matrix still has time bars, if you loved that UI
ITA Matrix doesn't seem to do anything like Hipmunk's UI.
> 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.
Why is that not enough? Does 1-2% not cover the (hopefully minimal) costs of performing such searches and calculations?
And yet, there are a bunch of services that offer flight search (whether or not it is profitable), none of which (that I know of) with a UI (as this is just a UI issue) as good as Hipmunk :(.
Thanks for posting that link! I came across that presentation several years back and found it quite enlightening. Then I thought of it for some reason a few months ago and tried Googling for it but couldn't find it. Very glad to stumble upon it again, and this time I'll definitely bookmark it.
1-2% is more of an upper bound. The numbers I've seen have been more like 10's of cents per conversion. And for whatever reasons, flight availability providers are not in the business of providing high throughput for clients, so the cost of performing those searches is probably considerably higher than you think. When I joined the travel industry I was shocked at what people considered reasonable latencies for availability calls, as well as the costs people pay just to get that level of performance.
If you want to make money in travel search, there's a lot more money in commissions for hotel bookings than in air.
That’s surprising considering that there isn’t a Google Flights interface for hotels (I.e. an aggregator through which users can purchase hotel reservations through hotel providers directly)
It‘a roomkey.com , but Marriott/IHG/Hilton/Hyatt/Choice/Wyndham franchise most hotels and collect a 10% to 15% royalty of gross revenue from hotel owners, so they don’t care about commissions paid since it’s not coming out of their pocket.
Google flights lets you adjust your flight takeoff and arrival times as well as min/max layover length, although the way that info is displayed when you're looking for a flight isn't quite as good as Hipmunk
I almost think I want a new kind of search these days, for which flights are actually cheapest, not just on ticket face price.
I want to know if I have to pay $30 each way to check a bag, or try to pack something that will fit in overhead, not trigger a TSA panic, and then struggle past everyone else's delays in security and boarding because they wanted to save $30 and are trying to carry on a bag they can barely lift over their head.
I want to know if they have created some "special class" that you have to pay $50 to be in, or wait twice as long at poorly staffed "regular" desks.
I want to know if they're skipping included meals on longer flights in favor of charging inflated prices.
I want to know if they're charging more for more desirable seats, both in location and comfort.
I want to know if they paywalled any other things that used to be standard.
You can go ahead and answer yes to all of those for any US airline and probably many non US airline, except maybe Singapore and the other top tier ones. But I assume that won’t be for long either.
It's sadly true for most. I have noticed that Southwest is a notable outlier in all this - they don't do any of that stuff. They also don't seem to register their flights on most of the search sites. It's like they know that those customers choose based on raw price alone, no room to sell any other differences. I make it a point to search their company site first before trying any other flight search.
On southwest you have to buy priority boarding or whatever it’s called if you want to sit next to a specific person, otherwise you will end up filling individual middle seats. It’s all one and the same to me, they all have to meet their revenue targets.
This has almost never happened to me when flying maybe 20 flights with Southwest together with someone, but it has happened with traditional airlines like American or Delta when they have full flights.
With SW if you buy the tickets together, and check in first possible moment (24h before), you get assigned the same boarding position, usually a early B number. Then you board together and likely half of the plane is likely still empty when you board.
People also sometimes say they are reserving the seat for someone. Have never bought priority boarding.
Yeah, Southwest keeps their pricing info private for the most part. Depending on the route, you can do better on Southwest than basic economy on another airline (and you can check bags or whatever), but the lack of IFE, their route plans, and the fact that there is so assigned seating (which means you either pay for early boarding or save seats for travel companions, which the FAs refuse to do anything about), not to mention my aversion for the FA schtick are part of why I will only fly them if there is no other choice.
United decided to start bringing back free small snacks.
Also they brought back free wine/beer and 2 free bags in economy. *
Well they did that on my ORD-IAH-SCL-VAL/EZE-IAH-ORD route. But they don't do it for the Euro routes. It's really difficult to determine what your final cost is, and that is intentional. If I book a flight on Emirites, it's pretty easy to know what I'm getting.. but when compariing it to another airline, who knows what's the better value.
Wow, wanderlog seems very cool! Way more intuitive than my custom google map / sheets that I've set up for a two week honeymoon around the corner. Will give it a whirl!
Yeah, Amex Travel is a reseller. I’m not sure if the backend the Amex Travel people see is the same as what we see as end users or if they have a different interface, but at my company, I call a number for Amex travel and speak to someone there, even for bookings made using Concur.
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.
I think it's gotten better actually. The jurassic version we had to use at megacorp back in 2014/15 was the only reason I had a windows VM installed. Whatever newer version was deployed a few years later was actually almost usable.
And, yeah, if I did more traveling I'd probably just call up our travel agent. But I'd still be on the hook for cash expenses.
Because they don’t have real competition and what it does do (corporate travel management) it actually does well (in the backend). It’s front end and mobile app are pretty shit, however.
It does have some competition when it comes to expenses: Expensify, Netsuite, Salesforce and homegrown stuff come into mind.
It's perfect enterprise software. It meets the legal requirements and integrates with things like nesuite or peoplesoft. Whether it's easy to use or not is inconsequential.
We used it once at one of my previous employers. It was used for creating and approving expense reports for travel, with various elaborate options for approval flow and documentation.
Concur's a business travel platform. These differ from consumer platforms in a few ways:
1. Private negotiated rates - medium-large companies have bulk rate discounts individually negotiated with various chains that can be integrated into the search flow.
2. Policy management - rules like C-level staff can fly business class, or regular employees may fly premium economy for flights over X hours, etc.
3. Expense report integration.
These things are important enough that most large companies are willing to subject their employees to a subpar travel search experience to get this. (I work for a Concur competitor but freely admit that our search experience is also subpar compared to consumer sites).
Why is it that Hipmunk had the best travel search interface I've used while SAP Concur's is absolute rubbish? What did they gain from the acquisition other than stopping a minor competitor?
Trivago, Kayak, etc would say otherwise. Yes margins are slim, but this is a classic case of why no UI/UX will ever trump mass distribution. OTAs are basically the walmart of the digital world.
Trivago is in the hotel business, which has better margins. Some sites like Expedia will actually take a loss on a flight if you book it with a hotel or rental car, which they make a profit on.
Kayak (and the rest of the Priceline/Booking.com group) takes a much more advertising driven model. You'll notice the site has lots of pushes to sign you up for their various mailing lists that yield long term reoccurring revenue on airline credit cards and travel packages.
It's odd to see so many commenters insist that there's money to be made in flight search, despite not having industry experience.
This comment nail it dead-on. Flights are a loss leader. It's the gateway to more profitable travel services like booking hotels, which ironically have shrinking margins over the last few years.
There's no need for an OTA middleman when a hotel can build a direct relationship with the customer (via loyalty programs).
> I personally use a combination of ITA Matrix, Google Flights, and Skyscanner now
May I recommend http://azair.eu/ for low cost searches in EU? The UI is a bit weird when doing a one way as the label on the date pickers do not change but the meaning does, one is the earliest departure the other is the latest departure instead of return latest.
Huh, Wanderlog looks a hell of a lot like what I've been playing with for the past few weeks, after unexpectedly gaining much free time just before Christmas, and failing to find something similar for my own use!
I'd definitely be dropping you a line if a) I was anywhere near North America and b) a Javascript guy...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> says more about the consolidation of the tech industry than Hipmunk's product
I kinda disagree. Hipmunk did not have access to the data that gave users a complete pictures on all travel routes. Even if they had a nice UI/ux, the underlying data was incomplete.
People naturally gravitated to sites where they found a route they wanted for the price they wanted.
That's true but it's also true that getting access to flight data is far easier the larger you get. Therefore the flights metasearch industry (and travel metasearch in general) will tend to consolidate to an extent.
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[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 236 ms ] thread[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20160413025405/https://developers...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15594975
[3] https://killedbygoogle.com
[1] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2491#comment-38434
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1479107
Momondo had to monetize a little in the past year, and now includes a little bit of referral spam, but still produces good results, their sort by “best” feature is usually helpful!
I loved Hipmunk for its personality and “agony sort”, though. Personality is often missing from modern travel brands.
My favorite part was how the results were listed by "agony", defined as a trade-off between price and length of the trip.
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.
I've had a number of travel startup ideas but all were held back by access to data.
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.
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?
They direct you to a place in the airport where you can guy a Visa gift card with cash and then pay for what you need from Delta.
I don't know if that's true of other carriers these days, or not.
Yes, it is silly you can "avoid it" by other card methods. But at least theres a longer trail associated with that, and probably puts you at a lower risk of being labeled as a concern.
She got pulled aside by security every single time for extra pat-downs and such. It got so frequent that they knew her by name, but they still went through the routine every single time.
She's very glad not to have that job anymore, but for other reasons.
May I ask why that wasn't your first choice for this particular incident?
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)
Might be a generational thing.
If it's through my usual airline I just book through the site or app, it takes a few seconds as they already have all of my information from pre-check to billing. Otherwise Google Flights is a great search interface and gives you a link to book directly through the airline.
I look at google flights, see the upcoming flights, don’t book because I don’t know how long it will take to get to the airport.
Driving to the airport, I call Delta, almost book their flight until they casually mention it’s delayed 8 hours.
Call United, it’s a 30 minute wait to book a ticket.
I put my Tesla in auto steer and pull out the app. Fucking thing keeps reminding me to touch the steering wheel. Eventually the Tesla revokes my auto steer privileges for the rest of the drive. Thanks. A. Lot.
I scream into the airport, while talking to Amex travel. There’s an united flight boarding in 20 minutes. Amex tells me that due to the inherent delay in the online ticketing process, to buy my ticket at the airport.
And that’s why you might have someone who couldn’t use the website to book a trip.
They say you don’t know what the guy in front of you could be dealing with. I was that guy that day.
I called Amex back and they expedited the ticketing. United never called me back after I left my number earlier for their automated call back service for the 30 minute hold time.
Not surprised it didn't make money, I would always use it alongside Kayak and then book directly with the airline/hotel/car company.
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.
That is a crazy thing to say.
Companies don't have to have any relationship with YC to be linked or discussed on HN. Just... look at the front page. Plaid, for instance.
Plaid's posts were third-party articles, and they got purchased for a billion. This is ad copy. Users would not have upvoted this, because it's not on-topic, were it by a non-YC company.
I didn't even intend to be implying relevancy was required on HN (my submission history is filled with articles that aren't relevant to much of anything) with the original comment; my statement was intended to give context. The second comment, though, was devil's advocacy that I'm still going to stand by: it's nothing but silly to act like ad copy is relevant to HN inherently.
Um, what? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4759841
There are many reasons why this could be the case, only one of which is naked self-interest on the part of YC to promote itself somehow. For example, it could also be correlative: YC funds interesting companies; HN covers interesting companies; thus you would expect that HN covers YC companies frequently.
Hipmunk was not just "a failed startup shutting down"; it was founded by a YC alum, as you note, but it was also design-focused with a distinct UX, good at PR, taking a somewhat combative approach in an industry popular on HN, etc., etc.
Most of that 96% of business do not have even one or two of those things?
In a perfectly fair world, companies would get attention based on the value they are providing to society, not on the level of VC funding or particular affiliations.
In particular, labor rights, non-profits, legal technology, and governance are generally under-reported despite their larger potential impact on society, largely because they aren't attractive to VCs looking for out-sized returns on investment.
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.
I suspect the common didn't get out alive.
As someone who's dabbled in flights bookings (BookWithMatrix) and now am working on a travel startup (Wanderlog, 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
Since I only use Hipmunk, which alternative would you say has the most comparable to the "agony" sort?
Google Flights also does this for the first few results it returns, before returning a bunch of flights in price sort order.
Great job!
How’s PHP holding up in 2020? Are you using a big framework? Are you using it because it’s what you’ve always known or did you choose it deliberately over other options?
I’m genuinely curious. Not meant to be negative. I’ve always wondered how well PHP scaled for others.
There really was (is?) no faster environment to get started with a single dynamic page that can submit a form and display data from a database. I don't have experience with the more recent frameworks, but I'm sure they're very mature now.
> ITA Matrix still has time bars, if you loved that UI
ITA Matrix doesn't seem to do anything like Hipmunk's UI.
> 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.
Why is that not enough? Does 1-2% not cover the (hopefully minimal) costs of performing such searches and calculations?
(I'm not saying 1-2% commission should or shouldn't cover the costs, just pointing out what goes into these engines).
I'm sure the margins are low but given the competition you need high volume to really win and it's a highly competitive and fragmented space.
The UI alone is only part of the business model.
If you want to make money in travel search, there's a lot more money in commissions for hotel bookings than in air.
I want to know if I have to pay $30 each way to check a bag, or try to pack something that will fit in overhead, not trigger a TSA panic, and then struggle past everyone else's delays in security and boarding because they wanted to save $30 and are trying to carry on a bag they can barely lift over their head.
I want to know if they have created some "special class" that you have to pay $50 to be in, or wait twice as long at poorly staffed "regular" desks.
I want to know if they're skipping included meals on longer flights in favor of charging inflated prices.
I want to know if they're charging more for more desirable seats, both in location and comfort.
I want to know if they paywalled any other things that used to be standard.
With SW if you buy the tickets together, and check in first possible moment (24h before), you get assigned the same boarding position, usually a early B number. Then you board together and likely half of the plane is likely still empty when you board.
People also sometimes say they are reserving the seat for someone. Have never bought priority boarding.
Some do, some don't based on the route.
United decided to start bringing back free small snacks.
Also they brought back free wine/beer and 2 free bags in economy. *
Well they did that on my ORD-IAH-SCL-VAL/EZE-IAH-ORD route. But they don't do it for the Euro routes. It's really difficult to determine what your final cost is, and that is intentional. If I book a flight on Emirites, it's pretty easy to know what I'm getting.. but when compariing it to another airline, who knows what's the better value.
https://www.concur.com/en-us/all-products-page
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.
And, yeah, if I did more traveling I'd probably just call up our travel agent. But I'd still be on the hook for cash expenses.
It does have some competition when it comes to expenses: Expensify, Netsuite, Salesforce and homegrown stuff come into mind.
1. Private negotiated rates - medium-large companies have bulk rate discounts individually negotiated with various chains that can be integrated into the search flow. 2. Policy management - rules like C-level staff can fly business class, or regular employees may fly premium economy for flights over X hours, etc. 3. Expense report integration.
These things are important enough that most large companies are willing to subject their employees to a subpar travel search experience to get this. (I work for a Concur competitor but freely admit that our search experience is also subpar compared to consumer sites).
Trivago, Kayak, etc would say otherwise. Yes margins are slim, but this is a classic case of why no UI/UX will ever trump mass distribution. OTAs are basically the walmart of the digital world.
Trivago is in the hotel business, which has better margins. Some sites like Expedia will actually take a loss on a flight if you book it with a hotel or rental car, which they make a profit on.
Kayak (and the rest of the Priceline/Booking.com group) takes a much more advertising driven model. You'll notice the site has lots of pushes to sign you up for their various mailing lists that yield long term reoccurring revenue on airline credit cards and travel packages.
This comment nail it dead-on. Flights are a loss leader. It's the gateway to more profitable travel services like booking hotels, which ironically have shrinking margins over the last few years.
There's no need for an OTA middleman when a hotel can build a direct relationship with the customer (via loyalty programs).
> I personally use a combination of ITA Matrix, Google Flights, and Skyscanner now
May I recommend http://azair.eu/ for low cost searches in EU? The UI is a bit weird when doing a one way as the label on the date pickers do not change but the meaning does, one is the earliest departure the other is the latest departure instead of return latest.
I'd definitely be dropping you a line if a) I was anywhere near North America and b) a Javascript guy...
Is there any other service allowing the same?
I hope that the team are able to quickly find other roles and don't find their lives too disrupted by this.
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.
1. https://greatescape.co/
Personally, I don't know what else to use instead.
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.
The only way to prevent this is with patents.
There are other ways. Network effects. Economies of scale. Branding. Arguably regulatory capture.
I kinda disagree. Hipmunk did not have access to the data that gave users a complete pictures on all travel routes. Even if they had a nice UI/ux, the underlying data was incomplete.
People naturally gravitated to sites where they found a route they wanted for the price they wanted.