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

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.