I don't doubt the sincerity of his own fondness of the site, but I still don't see why people continue to pretend that travel search is a pain point. Am I the only one who has no problem understanding travel search on Kayak and Bing? Travel search is a solved problem.
The travel market is huge and air search is still very fragmented with a lot of the low cost carriers (Southwest, Ryanair, etc.) not participating in metasearch engines. The most recent user research on travel planning/purchasing still shows most users visiting 6+ sites and spending a lot of time comparing prices, checking options, etc. so I think a lot of startups want to find a way to simplify the process. The problem with air though is the margins are low and outside of the UI, there's very few ways you can innovate with someone else's inventory.
At Room 77, we're exclusively focused on hotel search. This is also a market that's highly fragmented from a pricing/distribution perspective. You can get widely different pricing options for the same room at a hotel based on whether or not you're buying through the right channel. Sometimes, those channels are only accessible to travel agents or to wholesalers and other times the standard online travel agencies have the best price. We're aggregating every channel we can tap to find the best prices. Most people also don't realize that hotels discount for a lot of special groups like seniors, aaa members, military members, and government workers and those are not easily searchable today and we're starting to expose those in our search.
Of course, we've got a lot of work to do to simplify the UI and the search experience and would love to hear about any pain points you have when you're doing hotel search that we can solve.
There's not a whole lot can be done about fragmentation in search results for airlines that don't want to participate in comparison sites. The only way to fix that is for the airlines themselves to make the decision to change, and Southwest doesn't really have much to gain by doing so because they have a reputation for being a discout carrier despite having fares that are usually more expensive than many other major carriers. Same thing with Spirit Air. I usually maintain a short list of airlines that I know don't show up on travel sites and perform separate searches. Not the easiest thing in the world, but certainly not what I would consider a major pain point in my day.
In any case I don't see how Hipmunk eases that process at all. To me it is just a different view setting for a typical search site, which seems more like a feature than a game-changing business. Maybe I'm wrong, but I've tried searching the site a couple times but went back to using Bing and Kayak because I think they offer the best travel search that I've seen. I don't have anything against the site or its founders, I just have a hard time believing articles like this that rave about how much better the process is. I just don't see it, and based upon what others have written I think a lot would agree. It's not about being a naysayer, I just like to try to keep an objective viewpoint regardless of who is behind the business. If I thought it was an awesome service, I would certainly give it it's due.
The unsolved part of the problem is that not every airline allows their flights to be shown on these aggregating sites, which is a legal problem, not a technical problem.
Travel search will be a problem for me once I don't have to call each airline individually to get the best ticket prices for my two-year old. Discounts for children exist, but they vary based on airports, airlines, ticket type, and most airlines specifically only make them available through their hotlines. That is a pain point that needs to be solved, but it's not something that a pretty UI can do.
