I was a relatively senior member at Expedia, and though there is an obvious bias, I think Hipmunk is a bit overrated. Here's why
(1) They don't own any relationships with suppliers. UI/UX matter, but any business owner will tell you that those relationships are where the money is. Hipmunk still has to give 50%+ of it's earnings away to those who own the relationships.
(2) Hipmunk's differentiating factor is its UI/UX, but frankly, I don't think it's all that amazing. Its structure and optimization are great for nerds like me who read hacker news, but try getting your parents (or people who spend big bucks booking travel) to use it. I have, and the resounding response is how difficult it is to use. Again, there is a market for their product, but I think it's designed by nerds for nerds
(3) 1 million flight + hotel searches a month is actually nothing with respect to the market, especially considering how much I see ads for hipmunk. Anyone can make a white-label travel site and pay for traffic.
I'm not trying to be a contrarian just to be an asshole. And Hipmunk might have great things in the pipeline, but for now, they're one of hundreds of travel sites in my opinion.
1) Not sure what you're basing this claim on, but it's false.
2) To each his own, I suppose, but I have conflicting anecdotal evidence. Hipmunk passes the "parents test" with all of our parents :) And as for "people who spend big bucks booking travel," I can point to the huge amount of email we receive from assistants who use us exclusively. Maybe we're not everything to everyone, but we're at least making some people very happy.
3) We do re-target quite a bit, and that's probably what you're seeing. Most of our growth has come organically, which again speaks to the fact that we actually do help people find planes / hotels in far less time than our competitors, including Expedia.
Ah re #1 - I was under the impression that you were actually using Orbitz inventory for hotels (flights are through GDS I assume - but barely make money anyway).
re #2 - yah totally subjective and I have no data besides anecdotes
re #3 - again I have no data to support this. Just generally incredibly suspect of any growth that comes from SEM (though there's clearly cases where it's worked). Good to hear there's some retention, though.
For hotels, we do get Orbitz inventory, but we also have a number of direct relationships. As you know, hotels are much happier to do business with people like us because they're not perpetually going out of business.
We've experimented with SEM, but it's not really cost effective for us. Everyone else in the business runs their own ads, giving them an ad-arbitrage business model we simply don't have. The upside to our customers is that the site is cleaner, the downside is our margins are skinnier.
Makes sense. I wasn't trying to dog on hipmunk too much. Like I said, I actually really like it. My biggest thing with the UI was whether or not non-analytically-minded people appreciate the nuances you guys are working on. Anyways, happy to chat more if you're interested. I can also fuck off :P
What? Grow a pair. Everything you said in your first post is most certainly valid. These guys are full of shit and you called them on it, then you backed off on the first confrontation. I think you can do better than that.
Diplomatic is fine, but if you look at the other comments below, they all said what you said but not as eloquently, which is why you have the top voted comment. You represented everyone who voted that comment up.
Diplomatic is, "I wish you guys luck." It is not backing off your statement at the first sign of any sort of resistance to it.
You may be right about the relationships, and without that Hipmunk is vulnerable, but I think you're dead wrong about the UI.
The fact that old people don't "get" it just means they are used to the old UIs regardless of how crappy they are (a lot of them still call a travel agent due to sheer annoyance at the complexity of booking flights online). Most people do want the information that Hipmunk puts at your fingertips, and over time it will spread by word of mouth, and the younger generation who easily groks this type of UI will replace the aging population who hasn't grown up with deep data visualizations in their every day life.
Not every flight search is terrible on Orbitz/Expedia/Kayak, but I've done a few where all I could see was shit flights for pages and pages of results, and one search on Hipmunk yielded an obviously superior and amazing itinerary for $10 more.
Hipmunk may be weak on the pure business side, but they are one in a million on the UI side, and I predict that strength will take them places.
in many cases you need to start off just being an affiliate, then once you grow your traffic enough to attract bigger partners, you can cut out the middlemen
I want to love Hipmunk and I do a search on it every time I travel but Kayak has consistently returned flights that are $50 - $100 cheaper. I love the Hipmunk interface but not $100 worth.
In my case I always start with Hipmunk, find a schedule I like, then I check southwest.com and end up buying a similar flight at about 75% of the other airline price.
Truth. I use Southwest unless I have no other choice (the only times have been when I specifically needed a red-eye and when I took a Thanksgiving flight at the last minute). Aside from the price, it's also just less irritating: not having TVs showing ads on the back of every seat is a big plus, and I don't have to plan around not bringing checked luggage.
I used to use Southwest a lot until I started discovering the joys of having status on an old-school carrier. If you fly less than 25,000 miles a year then Southwest is great, but if you fly more (and especially if you get up to 50 or 100K miles) then the perks of United (or similar) become irresistible.
I don't have status with anyone, but I'm usually broke. My impression is that having status with a carrier gets you perks, it doesn't so much make the experience as cheap as Southwest (and if you're strictly flying domestically, you're talking a 6-hour flight, max. That's really not that bad).
Hipmunk is always my first stop for flights, but the last few I've booked I've ended up finding better deals elsewhere:
London to Toronto (cheaper with CanadianAffair.com)
Halifax, Canada to JFK (cheaper on US Airways site)
Edmonton, Canada to LGA (cheaper on US Airways site)
They're all at least partly non-US, but I was able to find similar price discrepancies with flights from NYC to SF and Seattle. For example, I am quoted $398 ($441 tax-in) for a flight from LGA to SEA round-trip from Aug 25 to Sept 8. Hipmunk gives me tickets from $398 each way, so I'd be paying twice as much minimum.
In Europe, I've found SkyScanner.net to be generally cheaper because they have more discount airlines (namely Jet2, easyJet, and GermanWings; I avoid RyanAir)
> I am quoted $398 ($441 tax-in) for a flight from LGA to SEA round-trip from Aug 25 to Sept 8. Hipmunk gives me tickets from $398 each way, so I'd be paying twice as much minimum.
This tripped me up the first time as well. That price is $398 round trip on Hipmonk. They show the best round trip price, not the best one way price. They say "from $398" to indicate that the best you can do is $398 if you pick the correct return flight.
Possibly due to a fare update happening around the time you did the search. When I do that search on Hipmunk I see a lowest fare of $899 (http://www.hipmunk.com/#!ORD_HNL,Dec28_Jan05@0,0) for a one-stop flight in each direction. Kayak's price is the same for the same itinerary.
Admittedly Kayak has one flight for $870 and a few for $896, but they involved two stops.
I have used hipmunk a handful of times and it is dead simple to use.
I do have a few problems with it:
1. There have been a few times that I have found a flight only to click through to another online flight aggregator (orbitz etc) to find they don't have the rates specified on hipmunk. Very frustrating.
2. I hate, hate, hate dealing with other aggregators (again..orbitz etc). I don't know if they do this already or it is in their long-term plan, but Hipmunk would benefit from working directly with Airline companies. Apologies if they already do this and I didn't see it.
3. This is less of a problem and more of a request: rental cars! Please do for rental car search what you did for flight search. It took me hours to find a car to rent after searching through the usual suspect's websites (hertz, budget, avis). Their websites are beyond terrible. For example, I went to select the pickup location for a rental car (on Budget) and when I clicked the location, the page reloaded with zero error feedback. I assume there was a problem with my selection but how was I suppose to know what it is? I clicked all the options and it just kept reloading the page. Terrible.
Hipmunk is a great product tackling a hard problem. However, they have a lot of work to do. I will continue to use them and hopefully they will continue to improve. Great job so far.
#1 We do our best to mitigate this. Unfortunately, it's also the nature of the business. Availability is constantly changing. What's really mindblowing is that Orbitz will often have flights in their own results that will error out. This isn't specific to Orbitz either, everyone has to deal with this.
#2 This is a big priority for us. We already have many direct deals, and more are on the way.
#1 We do our best to mitigate this. Unfortunately, it's also the nature of the business. Availability is constantly changing.
It's not just changing inventory though, I've had the same experience repeatedly over multiple days. hipmunk quoted me an itinerary, sent me through to (I think) US Airways to purchase it, and US Airways said it was no longer available and here's the same thing for $200 more. Gave up, tried again a few days later, hipmunk is still quoting the same fare.
Only happened for that one fare that one time, though. And I do love hipmunk and use it regularly. (Far more for speculating about places I'm thinking of going than for actually making bookings, I'm afraid).
Agreed. In the past, I've used hipmunk to find a flight, and once I found myself forwarded to Orbitz, went to the airline's site and looked up the same flight manually.
I love the visualization of Hipmunk, the problem is the leads never yield the price on the UI. It's always expensive, but I love the filters and their whole concept, wish they had better price accuracy.
I love Hipmunk, but I think they assume their superior interface warrants pretty radical price increases (anything over 5% is kind of ridiculous considering how easy it is to compare prices for the exact same flights with another competitor).
Maybe I'm missing something here, but it's never been worth it for me.
Spez, it took me no time at all to find a flight cheaper on Kayak than on Hipmunk. From Chicago to Honolulu (roundtrip) on 8/26 - 8/28, Kayak's cheapest rate is $936 total while Hipmunk's is $1063 total. This was my second search comparison between Kayak and Hipmunk. Not to be an ass, but this wasn't difficult at all, so you might want to incorporate some stricter testing before just saying that you "should have the same fares as everyone else online". Asking HN readers for examples when it's this easy appears as if you haven't done much testing and as if you're getting us to test for you.
I've seen this ORD -> HNL flight come up a couple times on this thread. So far, the prices that are better than ours seem to be flights with two connections, in a sea of results that only require one. I don't recall that exact algorithm off the top of my head, but that's the heart of the issue. This particular route seems to be a bit of an edge-case.
One of the tough things about this stuff, as alluded in other threads, is how frequently inventory changes. I just ran the same search you described as close to the same time as possible and...
Weird...it's still the same prices ($1063 and $936) for me. You may very well be right though, but I find it hard to believe that it changes in the second or two it takes me to do my search on Kayak to HipMunk
I love hipmunk for flights, but I'm less in love with the UI for hotels. I find it more confusing, and less easy to see what's good value. So if that's where they're really making their money then maybe they need to adapt it a bit.
I can see how in some cases it'd be great. If I'm looking for a hotel convenient to, say, the Denver Convention Center, then I can zoom in on that area and pick my favourite out of the small number of hotels within walking distance.
But if my goal is "I want a room somewhere in San Francisco, I don't especially care where as long as it's reasonably convenient, but it has to be reasonably good value but not too cheap" then I just get overwhelmed by having too many options and no obvious way to narrow them down (except by geography, which in this case I don't care too much about). And while I can easily understand "agony" as a function of price and duration, precisely what "ecstasy" should mean is beyond me.
Oh, and it seems to only tell me the average yelp rating, rather than the actual star class of the hotel, so it's really hard for me to decide whether $169 for the "Hotel Abri", with four yelp stars, is better or worse value than $106 a night for the "Hayes Valley Inn", also with four yelp stars. And then the Four Seasons, for $501 a night, gets 4.3 stars, but does that mean it's only slightly better than the Hayes Valley Inn? Probably not. Yelp stars generally aren't that useful except for identifying really awful places, since everywhere seems to rate somewhere between 3.5 and 4.5.
What I'd really like to see is information on how the price being asked for this hotel right now compares to the average price at which it's usually sold.
I love the UI and use it pretty frequently, but I have never booked a flight through there site because they do not support flying with infants and children.
The prices for my most recent trip were the same for what I searched on Kayak actually, but it may be because that it was more short notice (2-3 weeks in the future).
I'd like to hear about how they've attracted the volume. I never see ads for them and 1mm searches/mo seems bigger than the set of "techcrunch + hacker news readers".
1 million searches is OK but Compete shows them at 200K visitors/month: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/hipmunk.com/ and surprisingly, it shows they had MORE visits a year ago than they do around this time... so where's the growth? it seems stagnant...
It's really not much considering how much they advertise and my guess is that number is an aberration they paid for and that the real numbers are closer to what Compete shows.
They're trying to build excitement again, but if you ask Hollywood they will tell you that you can't make people like something they don't, no matter how much you market it.
I tend to agree. Hipmunk has a hip name, and is trying to create a brand for themselves, but it's hard to use word of mouth to market a flight search engine... it's like trying to use viral marketing to market a detergent.
It's hard to compete against established brands like Expedia, and Orbitz that has millions to play with.
(1) They don't own any relationships with suppliers. UI/UX matter, but any business owner will tell you that those relationships are where the money is. Hipmunk still has to give 50%+ of it's earnings away to those who own the relationships.
(2) Hipmunk's differentiating factor is its UI/UX, but frankly, I don't think it's all that amazing. Its structure and optimization are great for nerds like me who read hacker news, but try getting your parents (or people who spend big bucks booking travel) to use it. I have, and the resounding response is how difficult it is to use. Again, there is a market for their product, but I think it's designed by nerds for nerds
(3) 1 million flight + hotel searches a month is actually nothing with respect to the market, especially considering how much I see ads for hipmunk. Anyone can make a white-label travel site and pay for traffic.
I'm not trying to be a contrarian just to be an asshole. And Hipmunk might have great things in the pipeline, but for now, they're one of hundreds of travel sites in my opinion.