4 ms·

Hipmunk is going places. Travel is one of the most user-hostile consumer spaces around. All they have to do is stick to their guns, continue evolving their prod

Hipmunk is going places. Travel is one of the most user-hostile consumer spaces around. All they have to do is stick to their guns, continue evolving their product in a direction that puts the user first and they'll be on their way to printing money. Once you use Hipmunk, every other travel site looks like a stupid, ad-soaked bully with their constant upsells and bundles.

fossuser 16y ago
I agree, the site is sharp and has a lot of potential places to expand to (with seemingly no other good competition). I think it could be big.
SriniK 16y ago
I am big fan of hipmunk as well. However as a product point of view I am afraid other folks(kayak/bing-travel) can easily copy/tweak their front end to match. I couldn't find stickiness in their business model.
- danilocampos 16y ago
  They could, but they'll be playing catch-up. Hipmunk has the merit of, pro-actively, knowing the value of user focus. If they stick with that theme, there are innumerable places in the travel purchase experience that can be polished and made less miserable. You can copy ideas after the fact, but not the active brains that drive them. The brains are Hipmunk's greatest asset.
  - timcederman 16y ago
    What makes you think the other sites don't know the value of user focus? I am not sure that the aggregator experience is as miserable as you make out.
- chris_l 16y ago
  That's what I thought too. But then again, if they had the people to get that interface right, why haven't they done so before? The idea is not so far out, they simply don't compromise of ease and simplicity... like all good products.
  - LanceJones 16y ago
    Web design does not evolve that way. It evolves in fits and starts. In other words, someone does something new and other quickly follow. Half of the Web looks like either 37signals or Mint. :-)
- LanceJones 16y ago
  Hipmunk funding may also be a clue to the 3 big online travel aggregators that they need to provide better search UI. I agree that the front end is not difficult to copy. If even one of the Big 3 rolls this out, Hipmunk will be challenged to pull traffic... because their improved UI will be where the existing travel visitors are searching already.
timcederman 16y ago
Ad-soaked bully? Like who? I'm still a fan of Adioso.com's UI (another YC alum), and the TripAdvisor/Bing/Kayak experiences, from memory, are fairly subtle with their advertising.
- blhack 16y ago
  You're right about this. Kayk et al aren't saturated with ads, but they don't feel nearly as...something as hipmunk. Clean? Maybe? Shiny? I don't know but every time I've shown the site to any of my friends or coworkers they remark that it's pretty. Hipmunk vs Kayak or bing is the difference between a cheap casio watch and a nice, heavy, automatic winding watch with a pretty window on the back of the dial. They both tell the time, they both sit on your wrist, but the latter just...feels nicer.
  - danilocampos 16y ago
    Thoughtful. I think what you're grasping for is thoughtful. Hipmunk is very v1, but nonetheless you can tell how much thought has gone into the presentation of flight data. The agony sort, for example, is so blindingly obvious once you see it in practice, but no one bothered to give it any thought until now. Simplicity is actually really hard. They got it to work.
  - Psyonic 16y ago
    If that's all hipmunk has going for it (shiny?) than I wouldn't bet on them. Nasty interfaces often win (i.e. craigslist). The guys who started kayak are ex-orbitz people, so they've been around awhile and have data on what works. Don't get me wrong, I'm rooting for hipmunk. I would love to see them succeed. But they need more than shiny.
    - blhack 16y ago
      >Don't get me wrong, I'm rooting for hipmunk. I would love to see them succeed. But they need more than shiny. I'm not just talking about the interface, I'm talking about the experience overall.
- 16y ago
jojopotato 16y ago
Travel is a much more difficult business than it appears on the outset, it requires not just user-friendliness, but the business savvy to get the big players to provide you the information so that you can be user friendly. It's not that the large travel companies don't know they're user hostile, they're just trying to squeeze every last dime from the consumer they can.
fookyong 16y ago
just to bring a little pragmatism to the conversation... we have zero metrics on Hipmunk other than a warm-fuzzy feeling that it's "nice". until there is some kind of study or publicising of figures proving that Hipmunks approach sells more airline tickets than the big players' noisy "hard sell / up sell" approach, patting Hipmunk on the back at this point is just conjecture. the cynic in me says that it's relatively easy to boil a concept down to a graceful, user-friendly experience like this. it's an MVP-style 10-week challenge. the difficult part is extracting the maximum revenue from every customer in order to turn the MVP into a viable business, or a public company a la Expedia. that's the 10-year challenge. somewhere along the way, thousands of choices will have to be made as to where the slider should fall between these two product strategies - "User-focused" or "Revenue-focused". my guess is that as Hipmunk matures, there will be no escaping pushing that lever towards the latter.

fossuser 16y ago

I agree, the site is sharp and has a lot of potential places to expand to (with seemingly no other good competition). I think it could be big.

SriniK 16y ago

I am big fan of hipmunk as well. However as a product point of view I am afraid other folks(kayak/bing-travel) can easily copy/tweak their front end to match. I couldn't find stickiness in their business model.

danilocampos 16y ago
They could, but they'll be playing catch-up. Hipmunk has the merit of, pro-actively, knowing the value of user focus. If they stick with that theme, there are innumerable places in the travel purchase experience that can be polished and made less miserable. You can copy ideas after the fact, but not the active brains that drive them. The brains are Hipmunk's greatest asset.
- timcederman 16y ago
  What makes you think the other sites don't know the value of user focus? I am not sure that the aggregator experience is as miserable as you make out.
chris_l 16y ago
That's what I thought too. But then again, if they had the people to get that interface right, why haven't they done so before? The idea is not so far out, they simply don't compromise of ease and simplicity... like all good products.
- LanceJones 16y ago
  Web design does not evolve that way. It evolves in fits and starts. In other words, someone does something new and other quickly follow. Half of the Web looks like either 37signals or Mint. :-)
LanceJones 16y ago
Hipmunk funding may also be a clue to the 3 big online travel aggregators that they need to provide better search UI. I agree that the front end is not difficult to copy. If even one of the Big 3 rolls this out, Hipmunk will be challenged to pull traffic... because their improved UI will be where the existing travel visitors are searching already.

timcederman 16y ago

Ad-soaked bully? Like who? I'm still a fan of Adioso.com's UI (another YC alum), and the TripAdvisor/Bing/Kayak experiences, from memory, are fairly subtle with their advertising.

blhack 16y ago
You're right about this. Kayk et al aren't saturated with ads, but they don't feel nearly as...something as hipmunk. Clean? Maybe? Shiny? I don't know but every time I've shown the site to any of my friends or coworkers they remark that it's pretty. Hipmunk vs Kayak or bing is the difference between a cheap casio watch and a nice, heavy, automatic winding watch with a pretty window on the back of the dial. They both tell the time, they both sit on your wrist, but the latter just...feels nicer.
- danilocampos 16y ago
  Thoughtful. I think what you're grasping for is thoughtful. Hipmunk is very v1, but nonetheless you can tell how much thought has gone into the presentation of flight data. The agony sort, for example, is so blindingly obvious once you see it in practice, but no one bothered to give it any thought until now. Simplicity is actually really hard. They got it to work.
- Psyonic 16y ago
  If that's all hipmunk has going for it (shiny?) than I wouldn't bet on them. Nasty interfaces often win (i.e. craigslist). The guys who started kayak are ex-orbitz people, so they've been around awhile and have data on what works. Don't get me wrong, I'm rooting for hipmunk. I would love to see them succeed. But they need more than shiny.
  - blhack 16y ago
    >Don't get me wrong, I'm rooting for hipmunk. I would love to see them succeed. But they need more than shiny. I'm not just talking about the interface, I'm talking about the experience overall.
16y ago

jojopotato 16y ago

Travel is a much more difficult business than it appears on the outset, it requires not just user-friendliness, but the business savvy to get the big players to provide you the information so that you can be user friendly. It's not that the large travel companies don't know they're user hostile, they're just trying to squeeze every last dime from the consumer they can.

fookyong 16y ago

just to bring a little pragmatism to the conversation... we have zero metrics on Hipmunk other than a warm-fuzzy feeling that it's "nice". until there is some kind of study or publicising of figures proving that Hipmunks approach sells more airline tickets than the big players' noisy "hard sell / up sell" approach, patting Hipmunk on the back at this point is just conjecture. the cynic in me says that it's relatively easy to boil a concept down to a graceful, user-friendly experience like this. it's an MVP-style 10-week challenge. the difficult part is extracting the maximum revenue from every customer in order to turn the MVP into a viable business, or a public company a la Expedia. that's the 10-year challenge. somewhere along the way, thousands of choices will have to be made as to where the slider should fall between these two product strategies - "User-focused" or "Revenue-focused". my guess is that as Hipmunk matures, there will be no escaping pushing that lever towards the latter.