19 ms·

Hipmunk Says Goodbye

608 points by ienjoythebeach 7y ago

ape4 7y ago
As a Canadian, a feature I'd really like... request no stops in the USA. eg when flying to South America. (USA is a great country but doesn't get "in transit")
- rconti 7y ago
  How many countries do? I take it for granted traveling through Europe, but made the 'mistake' of booking a USA->Peru trip through Mexico City rather than taking a lounger journey through Miami, and had to clear customs and fill out a landing card for Mexico. Then it ended up being the same when transiting through intermediate countries in South America. I have so damn many passport stamps from just one trip, where I'm much more accustomed to shengen and EU travel in general.
  - ape4 7y ago
    Perhaps its small countries that do it best. Eg Hong Kong, Singapore. Well, the website needs a database of "in transit" aware countries (or airports) and option to prefer them.
    - rconti 7y ago
      Ah, I've not flown through those other major international hubs. I bet places like Dubai are super easy as well. I vote for your proposal! :)
- monksy 7y ago
  That being said, I would completely love to specify stopovers as the flight path, also completely avoid airlines (even fi they're codeshared). (I.e. Leftouthansa)
  - schmookeeg 7y ago
    I've had fun with airwander.com for looking at potential stopovers -- never booked through them, though, so can't make it an official recommendation. Usually when wanderlust strikes me, or I'm going somewhere terrible and want to inject "somewhere better" as a stopover, I find myself there contemplating the "ifs"
- deleted 7y ago
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fortran77 7y ago
Their name always confounded me. I never remembered what they did when someone mentioned this company. For some reasons, other "generically" named companies (Amazon, Adobe, Apple) don't have this issue, but this synthetic name just didn't ever mean "air travel" to me.
flybrand 7y ago
What’s your favorite alternative?
- ofrias 7y ago
  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 https://www.trabber.com
- jba 7y ago
  Google Flights. Skyscanner. Hopper.
- jimmaswell 7y ago
  Looking at the list of deals on Google Maps mainly.
- BlameKaneda 7y ago
  I'm a fan of Matrix: https://matrix.itasoftware.com/ https://matrix.itasoftware.com/
  - gspr 7y ago
    I feel Matrix is good at finding results, but it doesn't come close to Hipmunk in terms of presentation of those results :-/
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    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?
    - mpiedrav 7y ago
      Google used to offer the QPX Express[1] API for querying flights. Then it got killed[2], like 190+ Google services[3] [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20160413025405/https://developers.google.com/qpx-express/v1/trips/search http://web.archive.org/web/20160413025405/https://developers... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15594975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15594975 [3] https://killedbygoogle.com https://killedbygoogle.com
deleted 7y ago
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jba 7y ago
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.
- metanoia 7y ago
  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.
- kmundnic 7y ago
  I also found fares/options that I didn't find on other sites. My favorite part was how the results were listed by "agony", defined as a trade-off between price and length of the trip.
- tempsy 7y ago
  Define "brutal" 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.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    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.
  - nunez 7y ago
    They and Expedia/Priceline were super super early into the game
artursapek 7y ago
RIP. I wonder what happened. I guess it just doesn't make money?
- jonwachob91 7y ago
  The article says it all. Their parent company came up with a different way to do corporate travel solutions...
  - domador 7y ago
    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.
- coldcode 7y ago
  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.
deleted 7y ago
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narrator 7y ago
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?
- toyg 7y ago
  Api access to all those services is not cheap.
Multiplayer 7y ago
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?
- reaperducer 7y ago
  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.
  - rconti 7y ago
    offloading liability for cash tickets (terrorism) onto someone else.
  - monksy 7y ago
    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.
    - reaperducer 7y ago
      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.
kampsduac 7y ago
I used Hipmunk ever since I took Steve Huffman's (founder Reddit and Hipmunk) Udacity course. Not surprised it didn't make money, I would always use it alongside Kayak and then book directly with the airline/hotel/car company.
- bitL 7y ago
  That's how I learned about it as well.
kick 7y ago
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.
- anonu 7y ago
  I'm sorry. It's relevant to hn beyond the fact that it's a YC alum that coufounded it...
  - kick 7y 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.
    - schimmy_changa 7y ago
      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.
      - kick 7y ago
        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.
      - 9BillionMistake 7y ago
tonystubblebine 7y ago
Oh, bummer! 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.
mmhsieh 7y ago
Curious as to the terms of the exit in 2016. Does anyone know? This was a great site.
- _marlowe_ 7y ago
  This is a little speculative but doesn't seem like a reach https://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/concur-acquires-hipmunk.html https://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/concur-acquires-hipmun... I suspect the common didn't get out alive.
phsource 7y ago
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 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 https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/hipmunk
- jedberg 7y ago
  > have made it into all major meta-search tools, so it's not for nothing! Since I only use Hipmunk, which alternative would you say has the most comparable to the "agony" sort?
  - phsource 7y ago
    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.
- nathancahill 7y ago
  Oh no kidding, you're BookWithMatrix? Shooting you an email, your website has been life-changing.
  - 7y ago
bitL 7y ago
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. Is there any other service allowing the same?
- digitalnalogika 7y ago
  kiwi.com?
- cglong 7y ago
  Google Flights supports "multi-city" travel plans that does exactly this!
- benjaminRRR 7y ago
  If there's one thing we do a reasonable job on it's multicity. Link in bio.
krm01 7y ago
Warm feelings of the fun UI is the first thing that came to mind. I miss the products that Show the fun and quirkiness that went into building it.
ghc 7y ago
Really sad. Hipmunk was something I loved and something that took a lot of pain out of my life.
vector_spaces 7y ago
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.
- jedberg 7y ago
  Most of the team has already moved back to reddit. :)
  - zck 7y ago
    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.
    - stjohnswarts 7y ago
      I think being in the trenchs on small teams does that to you :) .
slg 7y ago
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.
tolmasky 7y ago
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.
- rconti 7y ago
  Yeah, it seems like an extremely broken font. (Safari, OS X, on a vertical 1080p monitor so my window is pretty narrow)
- baddox 7y ago
  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.
  - fareesh 7y ago
    Someone probably copied and pasted from somewhere into a JS rich text editor that converted it into html.
- geuis 7y ago
  Yeah I’m seeing that also.
- yoz-y 7y ago
  Interesting! At first I thought it was typed on a broken macbook keyboard.
- fierarul 7y ago
  Almost looks written hastily in one editor then copy-pasted into the website.
- 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
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xd1936 7y ago
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. 1. https://greatescape.co/ https://greatescape.co/
nik736 7y ago
I always liked the Hipmunk branding :-)
- majos 7y ago
  It and Padmapper are two services I occasionally use almost entirely because they have cute mascots. I’d probably even buy t-shirts with them.
seltzered_ 7y ago
There's a number of comments about how hipmunk declined or didn't have good prices. It reminded me of a recent Matthew Stoller piece ( https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-wave-of-terror-in-american-commerce https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-wave-of-terror-in-ame... ) : "Similarly, I spoke on a panel a few months ago in Congress on airlines, and Adam Goldstein, the former CEO of flight travel booking site Hipmunk, talked as well. I used to love Hipmunk, but it’s terrible now and I don’t use it. Goldstein explained why. He noted that after the wave of consolidation among airlines during the Obama years, airlines stopped allowing his site to have access to pricing data unless they hid certain routes to consumers. This move to avoid competition destroyed the business and harmed consumers. (It’s also obviously illegal, and the Department of Transportation has antitrust authority it doesn’t use to stop it.) Why did Goldstein speak publicly? Hipmunk sold itself off and he’s no longer there."
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  > "It’s also obviously illegal" I'm not sure it's as obvious as the author assumes. In the shopping sector, there's a concept of 'minimum advertised price' that every online store respects, which is set by manufacturers under the same carrot-stick arrangement (i.e. it's the price the manufacturer believes would drive the value of the entire market sector down if it were common, shopping aggregators aren't allowed to show products below that price, and if they do the manufacturer cuts the high-density pre-digested feed of feature descriptions for the product). It's clearly anti-market practice (in the sense that it adds information asymmetry between some part of the market and consumers in an attempt to keep prices higher), but it's being done by hundreds to thousands of manufacturers and it's real unclear on what criteria it'd be considered illegal. Many information asymmetries (even artificial ones) are not illegal, and indeed, even the moral argument for changing the law may not be as cut-and-dry as one assumes at first glance (for example, if sale below M.A.P. drops the bottom out of a market and kills an industry, the product can disappear from common production and the consumer doesn't benefit in the long run).
  - wpietri 7y ago
    > if sale below M.A.P. drops the bottom out of a market and kills an industry, the product can disappear from common production and the consumer doesn't benefit in the long run Is there an example of this happening anywhere in recent history? I ask because it seems absurd to me that there is an industry so fragile that retailers taking a bit less profit would lead to sudden, total collapse. (And doubly absurd this might apply to airlines.)
vecplane 7y ago
That's really sad. Hipmunk has been the only way I've found flights for the last several years, and I always loved it! Personally, I don't know what else to use instead.
- tobinfricke 7y ago
  Google Flights is excellent.
- kingnothing 7y ago
  I'm a huge fan of Kayak.
tempsy 7y ago
the holy grail of travel search engines is one that include award availability (+ amount) across all carriers
johnhess 7y ago
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.
- wolco 7y ago
  That strategy only works so far. Keep adding and things get bloated. Servicing a narrow use-case can cause them problems with coping.
  - majani 7y ago
    Facebook, WeChat and Office are counterpoints.
- linuxftw 7y ago
  An often echoed sentiment around here is 'is your startup idea a product, or a feature?' If you startup is a feature, it's just going to be copied. The only way to prevent this is with patents.
  - rhizome 7y ago
    Twitter is a feature.
    - hobs 7y ago
      Are networking effects a product or a feature?
      - rhizome 7y ago
        Category error, they're an effect. Is hunger a kind of food?
idlewords 7y ago
This thing is riddled with typos. It seems inconsiderate to say goodbye to your customers without at least reading the thing through for errors.
- nikanj 7y ago
  Do you also grammar check the eulogies at funerals?
  - chris_wot 7y ago
    If I’m listening to them, in general I’d expect some thought put into it.
ulfw 7y ago
RIP poor hipmunk. Been a huge fan of their site. A sign to never drop the ball and always keep innovating!
outside1234 7y ago
Thanks for all of the help you provided on booking trips for me!
cosmotic 7y ago
Hipmunk was simply the best. Very clean interface, no frills, quite thorough (except southwest), best presentation, easy to sort/evaluate ... A cute chipmunk. Looking at the three alternatives from all the other comments (google, matrix and skyscanner), they seem 5 or so years behind the times.
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  Southwest doesn't give out its pricing information at all. Which is why hipmunk didn't have it.
  - ec109685 7y ago
    Not very consumer friendly.
    - winslow 7y ago
      Transfarency
      - ianhawes 7y ago
        In Southwest’s defense, you’re showing their price next to the likes of Spirit and Frontier, whose base prices do not include checked bags.
    - tomhoward 7y ago
      It works out very well for them.
    - nitwit005 7y ago
      At the time when southwest cut them off, the online travel sites were expecting $5 to $10 in compensation. Offering the lowest price required trimming that cost. News story from 2002: https://www.cnet.com/news/southwest-soars-without-travel-sites/ https://www.cnet.com/news/southwest-soars-without-travel-sit...
cbright 7y ago
"Any time a company gets acquired, there are always concerns about what it means for the company and product. Here are some things to know: 1. Hipmunk isn’t going anywhere" -Adam Goldstein, October 3, 2016
- seppin 7y ago
  The problem is he had no authority to say that.
- jf22 7y ago
  I don't think it is reasonable to expect a promise like this to be kept three years later.
  - toyg 7y ago
    Two-three years is actually the optimal time frame to kill an acquired company, in my view, at least for big conglomerates. You avoid excessive brain-drain at the start by declaring far and wide that it will be “business as usual”; this way any useful know-how handover can happen smoothly, and you get a chance to identify the best bits you will eventually salvage. After a couple of years, you’ve likely cannibalized what was worth, the golden-handcuffed talent has either left or was moved to more critical areas, and the rest is just a legacy shell.
- cwilkes 7y ago
  “Isn’t going anywhere” is technically correct based on how you parse it.
sntax 7y ago
I use to work in the flight search industry. It is really hard to compete because you simply make nothing off of flights (your big margins are on hotels). I also doubt google let them hang on to the ITA matrix engine API since they seem to be closing that off to everyone. It is sad to see the last option for airbnb search in the metasearch space die off, but there are still plenty of good flight search engines out there.
unethical_ban 7y ago
I really liked Hipmunk's interface and used it to dream often. What I want out of airline aggregators, and what GFlights seems to do alright at: * Multi-city itineraries * Source and destination searches based on region/airport group (e.g. "AUS or DFW or IAH -> MUC or LHR) * Date range searching for flexible schedules and pricing One of my example searches recently: I want a flight from somewhere in Texas to somewhere in western europe, then to Dublin, then back to somewhere in Texas. I want to go for 9-13 days in February or March. Show me results by price. GFilghts seems to do this pretty well. I used to like Hipmunk, but I don't know if it had any competitive advantage over other systems mentioned here. They certainly pushed the envelope, even influencing the tools we name today. And to other comments, it is indeed unfortunate that pricing data is so obscured by airlines. Another instance in which the government should mandate more transparency.
neebz 7y ago
For me Hipmunk had the best calendar control. You could just type in your dates in pretty much any format and it was able to parse it. No need mess around with pop-ups and small buttons to switch months etc.
scottrogowski 7y ago
I worked for Hipmunk for a little over two years before they were purchased and have some fond memories of my time there. There have been a lot of articles on HN lately suggesting that it is better to work for a large company over a startup. Based on my time there, I would strongly disagree. I came in as a junior engineer (feral would be an appropriate term) and during my time, touched basically every part of the web application - backend and frontend. I made a lot of mistakes and through it all, I left significantly more experienced than I was when I started. I don't think there was a better place I could have spent my time at that stage of my career. My advice would be, do work for a startup. Even better, try to work for a startup like Hipmunk with an experienced senior engineering team who have worked on some hard problems - like how to scale Reddit in the era before AWS. You'll learn a lot.
- atom-morgan 7y ago
  > I came in as a junior engineer (feral would be an appropriate term) How did this work? From what I've seen, early stage startups always want senior only.
  - tmpz22 7y ago
    Start-ups hire "juniors" but they don't advertise the position as junior, you can identify these roles by virtue of them paying way under "market-rate". The downside is most companies (it seems Hipmunk was an exception) have little to no training for these "juniors" and you have to have a strong stomach for BS as you have to make do entirely by yourself. YMMV. I've been in a junior start-up role twice very early in my career. It worked out for me, but I wouldn't really advise it in an era of Google/MS hiring massive amounts of fresh grads with high comp.
  - celticninja 7y ago
    You can want seniors all you like but if your budget can't handle it you get juniors. This is how you end up with something that works bit doesn't scale well. By the time you need to scale you should be able to afford seniors.
deleted 7y ago
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jessriedel 7y ago
Off-topic: I have been a long-time Kayak user, but don't see many people mention it hear when discussing Hipmunk. Does anyone feel strongly that one of the competitors is better than Kayak? If so, could you elaborate? I have occasionally used Google Flights, but it seemed to have fewer knobs and I could not find any features that made me want to stay. The only competitors I have consistently but rarely used is Skiplagged, since it performs a kind of search (of somewhat dubious morals) that can't be done with Kayak.
- DangerousPie 7y ago
  I used to use Kayak and Skyscanner but started using Google Flights more recently because it has a much nicer interface.
  - jessriedel 7y ago
    Anything in particular you like about Google Flights over Kayak? Aesthetics, functionality, or efficiency?
    - therealdrag0 7y ago
      I just opened Kayak for the first time in a LONG time. - I don't like the rows and rows of panels trying to get me to go to other pages or see their guides. - I want a search focused page. - I don't like how when I click search, it automatically opens up cheapoair. - I don't like how the results page starts with a modal asking me to setup a price alert.
      - jessriedel 7y ago
        Thanks. I basically agree with those complaints. For what it's worth Kayak will stop automatically opening up comparisons like CheapOAir if you uncheck the box once, and it seems to remember that preference. I think the price alert modal is also a one-time thing.
    - yibg 7y ago
haney 7y ago
Might be off topic, but does anyone know what data providers / sources sites like Hipmunk and Kayak are pulling this data from? Is there a centralized source for flight data that’s freely available or is this pay to play? I’m trying to understand the business model and mechanics of how they sourced the information they indexed.
- doctorOb 7y ago
  Itinerary information they get from Amadeus[1] or ITA software (which google acquired to kickstart their flights product). Prices I imagine come from integrations with the hundreds of online travel agencies like Expedia, eDreams, etc. [1] https://skift.com/2012/08/07/amadeus-working-to-oust-ita-at-kayak/ https://skift.com/2012/08/07/amadeus-working-to-oust-ita-at-...
CrankyBear 7y ago
Well hell. I quite liked Hipmunk.
why-oh-why 7y ago
Something that’s hard for me to find is a website that gets me from point A to point B without caring about stop count and duration. Is the flight cheap and stops 23 hours in Hong Kong and 20 hours in Kuala Lumpur? I’ll take it. Also Kiwi and Google Flights let you make wide searches but their efficiency drops so low they’re basically useless in my experience. You’re better off searching day by day. Hipmunk never returned the best rates or routes for me so I had to drop it. Lately I’m really into dohop.com because it shows routes that others don’t (South East Asia)
- ojame 7y ago
  https://www.rome2rio.com/ https://www.rome2rio.com/ (No affiliation) has always served this purpose (at least locally, in Australia) pretty well for me.
- yezr 7y ago
  https://www.skiplagged.com https://www.skiplagged.com is exactly what you are looking for! dirt cheap flights sometimes with like 12 hour layovers. If you have the time (but not necessarily the money) it is just the ticket
  - why-oh-why 7y ago
    Sadly it doesn’t seem to work in this part of the world. I keep trying it but it never shows any SkipLagged flights, just the regular ones
  - splonk 7y ago
    Assuming skiplagged is still doing hidden city ticketing, it's important to recognize the risks involved here (primarily that overuse of it may cause airlines to reject your bookings and/or shut down your frequent flier accounts). It's probably a reasonable tradeoff for someone just looking for the cheapest flight once, but likely isn't for frequent travelers.
- gkoberger 7y ago
  You might like https://flightfox.com/ https://flightfox.com/. Your use case is the opposite of theirs, but it could help!
sanj 7y ago
What’s going on with the missing spaces in that article? “ the decision to retire the Hipmunk product. ” If there isn’t even anyone left to do minimal copy proofing, perhaps it is time to shut down.
SergeAx 7y ago
I am not a travel newbie, but I believe it's the first time I heard about Hipmunk. What was so innovative about them? It looks like yet another travel aggregator among at least half dozen of it's kind: Kiwi, SkyScanner, Kayak, Expedia, Priceline, Orbitz...
- toyg 7y ago
  The big thing at the beginning was the ability to sort by “agony”, i.e. a combination of travel time, number and length of layovers, and carrier quality. To this day I still find it the best search interface if price is not your only concern. It’s compact and easy to tweak. Unfortunately, the way they handled payments was too US-centric, which meant I often ended up looking up a flight with them and then actually booking it somewhere else (because you don’t want to book an Euro trip with some unknown US operator who may or may not be accountable if anything goes wrong). Also some of the cheapest airlines were typically not included.
rileytg 7y ago
hipmunk of old will be missed... i traveled all over the world with the intel they provided on cheap flights
eldavido 7y ago
Unusually personal for me because I worked in one of their offices, but for a different company, after they had moved out. Definitely feels like the end of a larger era. So much consolidation, stuff shutting down. "The end of the beginning", as one popular tech writer put it.
dewey 7y ago
I'll really miss it, the visual way of seeing how a flight is split up and how long the layovers are was better than all the other aggregators. Also with their sorting by "agony" feature was great and it was always easy to see the type of the airplane. I don't know any other aggregator who does it this well.
- degenerate 7y ago
  Google maps automatically factors in "agony" when you ask for transit directions (by design), and the "schedule explorer" gives you a visual layout of all the travel times and transfers you can use. It's very similar to the way Hipmunk displays flight information, so I never understood why Google Flights didn't adopt the schedule explorer from Google Maps...
ada1981 7y ago
Is there a down side to converting some of these things into open source projects? It could be cool to turn over the domain and source to a group, let them run it and use it.
misiti3780 7y ago
I remember Steve H. announced the launch of the company on the Tornado web server forum (backend was built with tornado). I used them a lot in the past, especially for the hotel heatmaps, which were super useful.
abvdasker 7y ago
Excited to see that Hipmunk is now a strong candidate for Our Incredible Journey (https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com)!
DaniFong 7y ago
:O how can this be, Hipmunk was so much better than the competition... people... people wanted it...
Aeolun 7y ago
A generous 8 days notice of the product shutting down. That’s a new record I think.
polymath21 7y ago
It's unfortunate for Hipmunk to just be turned off despite its founders trying to buy it back: https://skift.com/2020/01/14/hipmunk-co-founders-spurned-by-sap-concur-in-attempt-to-buy-back-the-company/ https://skift.com/2020/01/14/hipmunk-co-founders-spurned-by-... I remember being pretty amazed by its UI back when it launched, but unfortunately has fallen off the last few years. Flights are hard, and it's why we're staying away from flights at first for my travel startup Wanderium (wanderium.com). Instead we're focusing first on the "long tail" of travel issues: visas, vaccinations, safety, local customs, infrastructure, etc. By aggregating all of this data in a single place and presenting them in a single, personalized experience we think it can save travelers many hours per trip. Check out our beta if you're curious: https://www.wanderium.com https://www.wanderium.com
filmgirlcw 7y ago
I used to use Hipmunk, but at this point, I’ve built up a lot of airline loyalty and often find booking directly with the carrier or through a credit card portal (if I’m using points) for personal travel gives me the best fare. All my business travel has to go through Concur anyway, so search tools like Hipmunk and Kayak don’t matter, no matter how nice the interface. When I didn’t fly all the time, I didn’t care about loyalty. But I did 160,000 actual airline miles (far more FF miles earned) last year (most of them on one alliance, but enough to get lowest tier status on two others) last year and at this point, I’ll pay extra for Delta because I get auto-upgraded to Comfort+ at booking, I have a very good baggage allowance regardless of service class (assuming I’m main cabin and not basic economy, which I wouldn’t do anyway), I have a lounge membership, and I get frequent upgrades. At that point, my comfort and those benefits are way more important than saving a few dollars across airlines. And that’s the problem with these types of services, I think. They cater to the occasional traveler who doesn’t travel enough to make a profit (unless you’re Google and you own the software everyone else has to license), whereas the frequent travelers are either booking through corporate tools or directly with one airline because they have loyalty — or both. Catering to then majority of flyers who fly once a year, when margins are what they are on flights, is a tough business. It is interesting that Hipmunk's parent company got a piece of my $60k in travel last year (most of that was work, maybe $2500 was personal), because that’s where your percentages can matter.
- splonk 7y ago
  > Hipmunk's parent company got a piece of my $60k in travel last year (most of that was work, maybe $2500 was personal), because that’s where your percentages can matter. I think for corporate travel management, the fee structure is usually $X per transaction, rather than a percentage of the fare, although I can't speak to exactly how Concur charges, and it'll differ depending on the size of the customer. Average ticket prices for corporate airfare are likely considerably higher than for consumer, since that's where the majority of business class and refundable tickets are sold.
Mizza 7y ago
Damn, I've been a Hipmunk user since the very start. Probably 50 different flights through them. Can anybody recommend a replacement, particularly the sort-by-price, sort-by-agony, and the visual UI? I would have paid a 2-5% HipMunk fee to not have to go to all of the individual websites..
- bagels 7y ago
  I've been using google flights after Hipmunk started losing carriers.
grumo 7y ago
I'll miss Hipmunk. My career as a video producer started by creating an animation explaining their service back in late 2010. At that time, Alexis Ohanian was their marketing principal and he introduced me to many YC startups in need of similar videos. Soon after, I got to meet him, Adam Goldstein, and Ashton Kuther in person at SxSw 2011. Super nice people. Fond memories!
neonate 7y ago
It doesn't seem to be mentioned in this thread yet that the founders tried to buy it back: https://skift.com/2020/01/14/hipmunk-co-founders-spurned-by-sap-concur-in-attempt-to-buy-back-the-company/ https://skift.com/2020/01/14/hipmunk-co-founders-spurned-by-...
- fergie 7y ago
  "SAP Concur refused the offer. It intends to shutter both the Hipmunk consumer brand and the Concur Hipmunk business travel incarnation on January 23." Do Sap Concur stand to gain by closing Hipmunk down? Why would they not take money for something they were going to destroy anyway?
  - buro9 7y ago
    It's probably now integrated with their systems, and to disentangle would require engineering. You can argue that so long as the $$$ of the sale pays for it that SAP should sell it, but I would argue that if those engineers could be working on something else that is of higher value that you shouldn't try to sell it, especially if the cost of disentangling isn't well known.
  - MattSayar 7y ago
    The article mentions that it'd be embarrassing for SAP if they managed to make Hipmunk more successful than they could.
mmhsieh 7y ago
So what's the new Hipmunk? Most other sites - Orbitz, Travelocity, etc. - are pretty terrible. HM got more crashy over the last year but even with that, still better than the alternatives.
RangerScience 7y ago
Aww :( I know that other sites offer real advantages to Hipmunk, but to this day nothing beats their UI.
sdotsen 7y ago
so much for "Hipmunk isn’t going anywhere"
markthien 7y ago
it's so good that hipmunk terminated their metasearch services lol
mixmastamyk 7y ago
Bummer, I loved hipmunk's interface. Their time graph and sorting by agony was the best I've seen.
anonu 7y ago
Reminds me of milewise. Bought by merrissa Mayer as an acquihire company for Yahoo. Great idea that was left to die
mattcantstop 7y ago
We need to use SAP Concur at work for travel booking. It is possibly the worst software I have used.
IgorPartola 7y ago
Unrelated: it took me until this very moment to realize that hipmunk is chipmunk without the C. Is this the origin of the name and I am literally the last to figure it out?
- ludwigvan 7y ago
  You are definitely not the last since I hadn’t realized it either :)
bradleyjg 7y ago
Did all the people at Hipmunk immediately quit? If not how come SAP Concur (TM) 's web interface still looks, works, and feels like something out of the IE6 era?
- starky 7y ago
  Exactly my question when I learned through this post that Hipmunk is owned by Concur. The Concur flight search is the worst I've ever used. It feels like you have a better chance at winning the lottery than Concur's search actually showing you the flight that you want to take (that I already found on another website (usually Hipmunk)).
einpoklum 7y ago
This makes me wonder... how should I compare all these flight search sites? I mean, you may notice one has some feature another don't, but is there something more methodical?
midgetjones 7y ago
They keep talking about access to data, but not what's happening to the data itself. Is it being deleted? Sold?
homakov 7y ago
Google Flights as my go-to option. Unparalleled speed, can iterate over 10 days with click of a button.
bitL 7y ago
How much does running a service like Hipmunk cost? It might not be a good business for the current owner, but it could be profitable for e.g. company of four people. Wouldn't it be better to give it back to Huffman and run it as a small project?

ape4 7y ago

As a Canadian, a feature I'd really like... request no stops in the USA. eg when flying to South America. (USA is a great country but doesn't get "in transit")

rconti 7y ago
How many countries do? I take it for granted traveling through Europe, but made the 'mistake' of booking a USA->Peru trip through Mexico City rather than taking a lounger journey through Miami, and had to clear customs and fill out a landing card for Mexico. Then it ended up being the same when transiting through intermediate countries in South America. I have so damn many passport stamps from just one trip, where I'm much more accustomed to shengen and EU travel in general.
- ape4 7y ago
  Perhaps its small countries that do it best. Eg Hong Kong, Singapore. Well, the website needs a database of "in transit" aware countries (or airports) and option to prefer them.
  - rconti 7y ago
    Ah, I've not flown through those other major international hubs. I bet places like Dubai are super easy as well. I vote for your proposal! :)
monksy 7y ago
That being said, I would completely love to specify stopovers as the flight path, also completely avoid airlines (even fi they're codeshared). (I.e. Leftouthansa)
- schmookeeg 7y ago
  I've had fun with airwander.com for looking at potential stopovers -- never booked through them, though, so can't make it an official recommendation. Usually when wanderlust strikes me, or I'm going somewhere terrible and want to inject "somewhere better" as a stopover, I find myself there contemplating the "ifs"
deleted 7y ago
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fortran77 7y ago

Their name always confounded me. I never remembered what they did when someone mentioned this company. For some reasons, other "generically" named companies (Amazon, Adobe, Apple) don't have this issue, but this synthetic name just didn't ever mean "air travel" to me.

flybrand 7y ago

What’s your favorite alternative?

ofrias 7y ago
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 https://www.trabber.com
jba 7y ago
Google Flights. Skyscanner. Hopper.
jimmaswell 7y ago
Looking at the list of deals on Google Maps mainly.
BlameKaneda 7y ago
I'm a fan of Matrix: https://matrix.itasoftware.com/ https://matrix.itasoftware.com/
- gspr 7y ago
  I feel Matrix is good at finding results, but it doesn't come close to Hipmunk in terms of presentation of those results :-/
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  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?
  - mpiedrav 7y ago
    Google used to offer the QPX Express[1] API for querying flights. Then it got killed[2], like 190+ Google services[3] [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20160413025405/https://developers.google.com/qpx-express/v1/trips/search http://web.archive.org/web/20160413025405/https://developers... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15594975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15594975 [3] https://killedbygoogle.com https://killedbygoogle.com

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jba 7y ago

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.

metanoia 7y ago
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.
kmundnic 7y ago
I also found fares/options that I didn't find on other sites. My favorite part was how the results were listed by "agony", defined as a trade-off between price and length of the trip.
tempsy 7y ago
Define "brutal" 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.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  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.
- nunez 7y ago
  They and Expedia/Priceline were super super early into the game

artursapek 7y ago

RIP. I wonder what happened. I guess it just doesn't make money?

jonwachob91 7y ago
The article says it all. Their parent company came up with a different way to do corporate travel solutions...
- domador 7y ago
  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.
coldcode 7y ago
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.

deleted 7y ago

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narrator 7y ago

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?

toyg 7y ago
Api access to all those services is not cheap.

Multiplayer 7y ago

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?

reaperducer 7y ago
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.
- rconti 7y ago
  offloading liability for cash tickets (terrorism) onto someone else.
- monksy 7y ago
  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.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    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.

kampsduac 7y ago

I used Hipmunk ever since I took Steve Huffman's (founder Reddit and Hipmunk) Udacity course. Not surprised it didn't make money, I would always use it alongside Kayak and then book directly with the airline/hotel/car company.

bitL 7y ago
That's how I learned about it as well.

kick 7y ago

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.

anonu 7y ago
I'm sorry. It's relevant to hn beyond the fact that it's a YC alum that coufounded it...
- kick 7y 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.
  - schimmy_changa 7y ago
    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.
    - kick 7y ago
      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.
    - 9BillionMistake 7y ago

tonystubblebine 7y ago

Oh, bummer! 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.

mmhsieh 7y ago

Curious as to the terms of the exit in 2016. Does anyone know? This was a great site.

_marlowe_ 7y ago
This is a little speculative but doesn't seem like a reach https://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/concur-acquires-hipmunk.html https://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/concur-acquires-hipmun... I suspect the common didn't get out alive.

phsource 7y ago

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 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 https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/hipmunk

jedberg 7y ago
> have made it into all major meta-search tools, so it's not for nothing! Since I only use Hipmunk, which alternative would you say has the most comparable to the "agony" sort?
- phsource 7y ago
  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.
nathancahill 7y ago
Oh no kidding, you're BookWithMatrix? Shooting you an email, your website has been life-changing.
- 7y ago

bitL 7y ago

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. Is there any other service allowing the same?

digitalnalogika 7y ago
kiwi.com?
cglong 7y ago
Google Flights supports "multi-city" travel plans that does exactly this!
benjaminRRR 7y ago
If there's one thing we do a reasonable job on it's multicity. Link in bio.

krm01 7y ago

Warm feelings of the fun UI is the first thing that came to mind. I miss the products that Show the fun and quirkiness that went into building it.

ghc 7y ago

Really sad. Hipmunk was something I loved and something that took a lot of pain out of my life.

vector_spaces 7y ago

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.

jedberg 7y ago
Most of the team has already moved back to reddit. :)
- zck 7y ago
  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.
  - stjohnswarts 7y ago
    I think being in the trenchs on small teams does that to you :) .

slg 7y ago

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.

tolmasky 7y ago

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.

rconti 7y ago
Yeah, it seems like an extremely broken font. (Safari, OS X, on a vertical 1080p monitor so my window is pretty narrow)
baddox 7y ago
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.
- fareesh 7y ago
  Someone probably copied and pasted from somewhere into a JS rich text editor that converted it into html.
geuis 7y ago
Yeah I’m seeing that also.
yoz-y 7y ago
Interesting! At first I thought it was typed on a broken macbook keyboard.
fierarul 7y ago
Almost looks written hastily in one editor then copy-pasted into the website.
7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

xd1936 7y ago

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. 1. https://greatescape.co/ https://greatescape.co/

nik736 7y ago

I always liked the Hipmunk branding :-)

majos 7y ago
It and Padmapper are two services I occasionally use almost entirely because they have cute mascots. I’d probably even buy t-shirts with them.

seltzered_ 7y ago

There's a number of comments about how hipmunk declined or didn't have good prices. It reminded me of a recent Matthew Stoller piece ( https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-wave-of-terror-in-american-commerce https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-wave-of-terror-in-ame... ) : "Similarly, I spoke on a panel a few months ago in Congress on airlines, and Adam Goldstein, the former CEO of flight travel booking site Hipmunk, talked as well. I used to love Hipmunk, but it’s terrible now and I don’t use it. Goldstein explained why. He noted that after the wave of consolidation among airlines during the Obama years, airlines stopped allowing his site to have access to pricing data unless they hid certain routes to consumers. This move to avoid competition destroyed the business and harmed consumers. (It’s also obviously illegal, and the Department of Transportation has antitrust authority it doesn’t use to stop it.) Why did Goldstein speak publicly? Hipmunk sold itself off and he’s no longer there."

shadowgovt 7y ago
> "It’s also obviously illegal" I'm not sure it's as obvious as the author assumes. In the shopping sector, there's a concept of 'minimum advertised price' that every online store respects, which is set by manufacturers under the same carrot-stick arrangement (i.e. it's the price the manufacturer believes would drive the value of the entire market sector down if it were common, shopping aggregators aren't allowed to show products below that price, and if they do the manufacturer cuts the high-density pre-digested feed of feature descriptions for the product). It's clearly anti-market practice (in the sense that it adds information asymmetry between some part of the market and consumers in an attempt to keep prices higher), but it's being done by hundreds to thousands of manufacturers and it's real unclear on what criteria it'd be considered illegal. Many information asymmetries (even artificial ones) are not illegal, and indeed, even the moral argument for changing the law may not be as cut-and-dry as one assumes at first glance (for example, if sale below M.A.P. drops the bottom out of a market and kills an industry, the product can disappear from common production and the consumer doesn't benefit in the long run).
- wpietri 7y ago
  > if sale below M.A.P. drops the bottom out of a market and kills an industry, the product can disappear from common production and the consumer doesn't benefit in the long run Is there an example of this happening anywhere in recent history? I ask because it seems absurd to me that there is an industry so fragile that retailers taking a bit less profit would lead to sudden, total collapse. (And doubly absurd this might apply to airlines.)

vecplane 7y ago

That's really sad. Hipmunk has been the only way I've found flights for the last several years, and I always loved it! Personally, I don't know what else to use instead.

tobinfricke 7y ago
Google Flights is excellent.
kingnothing 7y ago
I'm a huge fan of Kayak.

tempsy 7y ago

the holy grail of travel search engines is one that include award availability (+ amount) across all carriers

johnhess 7y ago

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.

wolco 7y ago
That strategy only works so far. Keep adding and things get bloated. Servicing a narrow use-case can cause them problems with coping.
- majani 7y ago
  Facebook, WeChat and Office are counterpoints.
linuxftw 7y ago
An often echoed sentiment around here is 'is your startup idea a product, or a feature?' If you startup is a feature, it's just going to be copied. The only way to prevent this is with patents.
- rhizome 7y ago
  Twitter is a feature.
  - hobs 7y ago
    Are networking effects a product or a feature?
    - rhizome 7y ago
      Category error, they're an effect. Is hunger a kind of food?

idlewords 7y ago

This thing is riddled with typos. It seems inconsiderate to say goodbye to your customers without at least reading the thing through for errors.

nikanj 7y ago
Do you also grammar check the eulogies at funerals?
- chris_wot 7y ago
  If I’m listening to them, in general I’d expect some thought put into it.

ulfw 7y ago

RIP poor hipmunk. Been a huge fan of their site. A sign to never drop the ball and always keep innovating!

outside1234 7y ago

Thanks for all of the help you provided on booking trips for me!

cosmotic 7y ago

Hipmunk was simply the best. Very clean interface, no frills, quite thorough (except southwest), best presentation, easy to sort/evaluate ... A cute chipmunk. Looking at the three alternatives from all the other comments (google, matrix and skyscanner), they seem 5 or so years behind the times.

stjohnswarts 7y ago
Southwest doesn't give out its pricing information at all. Which is why hipmunk didn't have it.
- ec109685 7y ago
  Not very consumer friendly.
  - winslow 7y ago
    Transfarency
    - ianhawes 7y ago
      In Southwest’s defense, you’re showing their price next to the likes of Spirit and Frontier, whose base prices do not include checked bags.
  - tomhoward 7y ago
    It works out very well for them.
  - nitwit005 7y ago
    At the time when southwest cut them off, the online travel sites were expecting $5 to $10 in compensation. Offering the lowest price required trimming that cost. News story from 2002: https://www.cnet.com/news/southwest-soars-without-travel-sites/ https://www.cnet.com/news/southwest-soars-without-travel-sit...

cbright 7y ago

"Any time a company gets acquired, there are always concerns about what it means for the company and product. Here are some things to know: 1. Hipmunk isn’t going anywhere" -Adam Goldstein, October 3, 2016

seppin 7y ago
The problem is he had no authority to say that.
jf22 7y ago
I don't think it is reasonable to expect a promise like this to be kept three years later.
- toyg 7y ago
  Two-three years is actually the optimal time frame to kill an acquired company, in my view, at least for big conglomerates. You avoid excessive brain-drain at the start by declaring far and wide that it will be “business as usual”; this way any useful know-how handover can happen smoothly, and you get a chance to identify the best bits you will eventually salvage. After a couple of years, you’ve likely cannibalized what was worth, the golden-handcuffed talent has either left or was moved to more critical areas, and the rest is just a legacy shell.
cwilkes 7y ago
“Isn’t going anywhere” is technically correct based on how you parse it.

sntax 7y ago

I use to work in the flight search industry. It is really hard to compete because you simply make nothing off of flights (your big margins are on hotels). I also doubt google let them hang on to the ITA matrix engine API since they seem to be closing that off to everyone. It is sad to see the last option for airbnb search in the metasearch space die off, but there are still plenty of good flight search engines out there.

unethical_ban 7y ago

I really liked Hipmunk's interface and used it to dream often. What I want out of airline aggregators, and what GFlights seems to do alright at: * Multi-city itineraries * Source and destination searches based on region/airport group (e.g. "AUS or DFW or IAH -> MUC or LHR) * Date range searching for flexible schedules and pricing One of my example searches recently: I want a flight from somewhere in Texas to somewhere in western europe, then to Dublin, then back to somewhere in Texas. I want to go for 9-13 days in February or March. Show me results by price. GFilghts seems to do this pretty well. I used to like Hipmunk, but I don't know if it had any competitive advantage over other systems mentioned here. They certainly pushed the envelope, even influencing the tools we name today. And to other comments, it is indeed unfortunate that pricing data is so obscured by airlines. Another instance in which the government should mandate more transparency.

neebz 7y ago

For me Hipmunk had the best calendar control. You could just type in your dates in pretty much any format and it was able to parse it. No need mess around with pop-ups and small buttons to switch months etc.

scottrogowski 7y ago

I worked for Hipmunk for a little over two years before they were purchased and have some fond memories of my time there. There have been a lot of articles on HN lately suggesting that it is better to work for a large company over a startup. Based on my time there, I would strongly disagree. I came in as a junior engineer (feral would be an appropriate term) and during my time, touched basically every part of the web application - backend and frontend. I made a lot of mistakes and through it all, I left significantly more experienced than I was when I started. I don't think there was a better place I could have spent my time at that stage of my career. My advice would be, do work for a startup. Even better, try to work for a startup like Hipmunk with an experienced senior engineering team who have worked on some hard problems - like how to scale Reddit in the era before AWS. You'll learn a lot.

atom-morgan 7y ago
> I came in as a junior engineer (feral would be an appropriate term) How did this work? From what I've seen, early stage startups always want senior only.
- tmpz22 7y ago
  Start-ups hire "juniors" but they don't advertise the position as junior, you can identify these roles by virtue of them paying way under "market-rate". The downside is most companies (it seems Hipmunk was an exception) have little to no training for these "juniors" and you have to have a strong stomach for BS as you have to make do entirely by yourself. YMMV. I've been in a junior start-up role twice very early in my career. It worked out for me, but I wouldn't really advise it in an era of Google/MS hiring massive amounts of fresh grads with high comp.
- celticninja 7y ago
  You can want seniors all you like but if your budget can't handle it you get juniors. This is how you end up with something that works bit doesn't scale well. By the time you need to scale you should be able to afford seniors.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jessriedel 7y ago

Off-topic: I have been a long-time Kayak user, but don't see many people mention it hear when discussing Hipmunk. Does anyone feel strongly that one of the competitors is better than Kayak? If so, could you elaborate? I have occasionally used Google Flights, but it seemed to have fewer knobs and I could not find any features that made me want to stay. The only competitors I have consistently but rarely used is Skiplagged, since it performs a kind of search (of somewhat dubious morals) that can't be done with Kayak.

DangerousPie 7y ago
I used to use Kayak and Skyscanner but started using Google Flights more recently because it has a much nicer interface.
- jessriedel 7y ago
  Anything in particular you like about Google Flights over Kayak? Aesthetics, functionality, or efficiency?
  - therealdrag0 7y ago
    I just opened Kayak for the first time in a LONG time. - I don't like the rows and rows of panels trying to get me to go to other pages or see their guides. - I want a search focused page. - I don't like how when I click search, it automatically opens up cheapoair. - I don't like how the results page starts with a modal asking me to setup a price alert.
    - jessriedel 7y ago
      Thanks. I basically agree with those complaints. For what it's worth Kayak will stop automatically opening up comparisons like CheapOAir if you uncheck the box once, and it seems to remember that preference. I think the price alert modal is also a one-time thing.
  - yibg 7y ago

haney 7y ago

Might be off topic, but does anyone know what data providers / sources sites like Hipmunk and Kayak are pulling this data from? Is there a centralized source for flight data that’s freely available or is this pay to play? I’m trying to understand the business model and mechanics of how they sourced the information they indexed.

doctorOb 7y ago
Itinerary information they get from Amadeus[1] or ITA software (which google acquired to kickstart their flights product). Prices I imagine come from integrations with the hundreds of online travel agencies like Expedia, eDreams, etc. [1] https://skift.com/2012/08/07/amadeus-working-to-oust-ita-at-kayak/ https://skift.com/2012/08/07/amadeus-working-to-oust-ita-at-...

CrankyBear 7y ago

Well hell. I quite liked Hipmunk.

why-oh-why 7y ago

Something that’s hard for me to find is a website that gets me from point A to point B without caring about stop count and duration. Is the flight cheap and stops 23 hours in Hong Kong and 20 hours in Kuala Lumpur? I’ll take it. Also Kiwi and Google Flights let you make wide searches but their efficiency drops so low they’re basically useless in my experience. You’re better off searching day by day. Hipmunk never returned the best rates or routes for me so I had to drop it. Lately I’m really into dohop.com because it shows routes that others don’t (South East Asia)

ojame 7y ago
https://www.rome2rio.com/ https://www.rome2rio.com/ (No affiliation) has always served this purpose (at least locally, in Australia) pretty well for me.
yezr 7y ago
https://www.skiplagged.com https://www.skiplagged.com is exactly what you are looking for! dirt cheap flights sometimes with like 12 hour layovers. If you have the time (but not necessarily the money) it is just the ticket
- why-oh-why 7y ago
  Sadly it doesn’t seem to work in this part of the world. I keep trying it but it never shows any SkipLagged flights, just the regular ones
- splonk 7y ago
  Assuming skiplagged is still doing hidden city ticketing, it's important to recognize the risks involved here (primarily that overuse of it may cause airlines to reject your bookings and/or shut down your frequent flier accounts). It's probably a reasonable tradeoff for someone just looking for the cheapest flight once, but likely isn't for frequent travelers.
gkoberger 7y ago
You might like https://flightfox.com/ https://flightfox.com/. Your use case is the opposite of theirs, but it could help!

sanj 7y ago

What’s going on with the missing spaces in that article? “ the decision to retire the Hipmunk product. ” If there isn’t even anyone left to do minimal copy proofing, perhaps it is time to shut down.

SergeAx 7y ago

I am not a travel newbie, but I believe it's the first time I heard about Hipmunk. What was so innovative about them? It looks like yet another travel aggregator among at least half dozen of it's kind: Kiwi, SkyScanner, Kayak, Expedia, Priceline, Orbitz...

toyg 7y ago
The big thing at the beginning was the ability to sort by “agony”, i.e. a combination of travel time, number and length of layovers, and carrier quality. To this day I still find it the best search interface if price is not your only concern. It’s compact and easy to tweak. Unfortunately, the way they handled payments was too US-centric, which meant I often ended up looking up a flight with them and then actually booking it somewhere else (because you don’t want to book an Euro trip with some unknown US operator who may or may not be accountable if anything goes wrong). Also some of the cheapest airlines were typically not included.

rileytg 7y ago

hipmunk of old will be missed... i traveled all over the world with the intel they provided on cheap flights

eldavido 7y ago

Unusually personal for me because I worked in one of their offices, but for a different company, after they had moved out. Definitely feels like the end of a larger era. So much consolidation, stuff shutting down. "The end of the beginning", as one popular tech writer put it.

dewey 7y ago

I'll really miss it, the visual way of seeing how a flight is split up and how long the layovers are was better than all the other aggregators. Also with their sorting by "agony" feature was great and it was always easy to see the type of the airplane. I don't know any other aggregator who does it this well.

degenerate 7y ago
Google maps automatically factors in "agony" when you ask for transit directions (by design), and the "schedule explorer" gives you a visual layout of all the travel times and transfers you can use. It's very similar to the way Hipmunk displays flight information, so I never understood why Google Flights didn't adopt the schedule explorer from Google Maps...

ada1981 7y ago

Is there a down side to converting some of these things into open source projects? It could be cool to turn over the domain and source to a group, let them run it and use it.

misiti3780 7y ago

I remember Steve H. announced the launch of the company on the Tornado web server forum (backend was built with tornado). I used them a lot in the past, especially for the hotel heatmaps, which were super useful.

abvdasker 7y ago

Excited to see that Hipmunk is now a strong candidate for Our Incredible Journey (https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com)!

DaniFong 7y ago

:O how can this be, Hipmunk was so much better than the competition... people... people wanted it...

Aeolun 7y ago

A generous 8 days notice of the product shutting down. That’s a new record I think.

polymath21 7y ago

It's unfortunate for Hipmunk to just be turned off despite its founders trying to buy it back: https://skift.com/2020/01/14/hipmunk-co-founders-spurned-by-sap-concur-in-attempt-to-buy-back-the-company/ https://skift.com/2020/01/14/hipmunk-co-founders-spurned-by-... I remember being pretty amazed by its UI back when it launched, but unfortunately has fallen off the last few years. Flights are hard, and it's why we're staying away from flights at first for my travel startup Wanderium (wanderium.com). Instead we're focusing first on the "long tail" of travel issues: visas, vaccinations, safety, local customs, infrastructure, etc. By aggregating all of this data in a single place and presenting them in a single, personalized experience we think it can save travelers many hours per trip. Check out our beta if you're curious: https://www.wanderium.com https://www.wanderium.com

filmgirlcw 7y ago

I used to use Hipmunk, but at this point, I’ve built up a lot of airline loyalty and often find booking directly with the carrier or through a credit card portal (if I’m using points) for personal travel gives me the best fare. All my business travel has to go through Concur anyway, so search tools like Hipmunk and Kayak don’t matter, no matter how nice the interface. When I didn’t fly all the time, I didn’t care about loyalty. But I did 160,000 actual airline miles (far more FF miles earned) last year (most of them on one alliance, but enough to get lowest tier status on two others) last year and at this point, I’ll pay extra for Delta because I get auto-upgraded to Comfort+ at booking, I have a very good baggage allowance regardless of service class (assuming I’m main cabin and not basic economy, which I wouldn’t do anyway), I have a lounge membership, and I get frequent upgrades. At that point, my comfort and those benefits are way more important than saving a few dollars across airlines. And that’s the problem with these types of services, I think. They cater to the occasional traveler who doesn’t travel enough to make a profit (unless you’re Google and you own the software everyone else has to license), whereas the frequent travelers are either booking through corporate tools or directly with one airline because they have loyalty — or both. Catering to then majority of flyers who fly once a year, when margins are what they are on flights, is a tough business. It is interesting that Hipmunk's parent company got a piece of my $60k in travel last year (most of that was work, maybe $2500 was personal), because that’s where your percentages can matter.

splonk 7y ago
> Hipmunk's parent company got a piece of my $60k in travel last year (most of that was work, maybe $2500 was personal), because that’s where your percentages can matter. I think for corporate travel management, the fee structure is usually $X per transaction, rather than a percentage of the fare, although I can't speak to exactly how Concur charges, and it'll differ depending on the size of the customer. Average ticket prices for corporate airfare are likely considerably higher than for consumer, since that's where the majority of business class and refundable tickets are sold.

Mizza 7y ago

Damn, I've been a Hipmunk user since the very start. Probably 50 different flights through them. Can anybody recommend a replacement, particularly the sort-by-price, sort-by-agony, and the visual UI? I would have paid a 2-5% HipMunk fee to not have to go to all of the individual websites..

bagels 7y ago
I've been using google flights after Hipmunk started losing carriers.

grumo 7y ago

I'll miss Hipmunk. My career as a video producer started by creating an animation explaining their service back in late 2010. At that time, Alexis Ohanian was their marketing principal and he introduced me to many YC startups in need of similar videos. Soon after, I got to meet him, Adam Goldstein, and Ashton Kuther in person at SxSw 2011. Super nice people. Fond memories!

neonate 7y ago

It doesn't seem to be mentioned in this thread yet that the founders tried to buy it back: https://skift.com/2020/01/14/hipmunk-co-founders-spurned-by-sap-concur-in-attempt-to-buy-back-the-company/ https://skift.com/2020/01/14/hipmunk-co-founders-spurned-by-...

fergie 7y ago
"SAP Concur refused the offer. It intends to shutter both the Hipmunk consumer brand and the Concur Hipmunk business travel incarnation on January 23." Do Sap Concur stand to gain by closing Hipmunk down? Why would they not take money for something they were going to destroy anyway?
- buro9 7y ago
  It's probably now integrated with their systems, and to disentangle would require engineering. You can argue that so long as the $$$ of the sale pays for it that SAP should sell it, but I would argue that if those engineers could be working on something else that is of higher value that you shouldn't try to sell it, especially if the cost of disentangling isn't well known.
- MattSayar 7y ago
  The article mentions that it'd be embarrassing for SAP if they managed to make Hipmunk more successful than they could.

mmhsieh 7y ago

So what's the new Hipmunk? Most other sites - Orbitz, Travelocity, etc. - are pretty terrible. HM got more crashy over the last year but even with that, still better than the alternatives.

RangerScience 7y ago

Aww :( I know that other sites offer real advantages to Hipmunk, but to this day nothing beats their UI.

sdotsen 7y ago

so much for "Hipmunk isn’t going anywhere"

markthien 7y ago

it's so good that hipmunk terminated their metasearch services lol

mixmastamyk 7y ago

Bummer, I loved hipmunk's interface. Their time graph and sorting by agony was the best I've seen.

anonu 7y ago

Reminds me of milewise. Bought by merrissa Mayer as an acquihire company for Yahoo. Great idea that was left to die

mattcantstop 7y ago

We need to use SAP Concur at work for travel booking. It is possibly the worst software I have used.

IgorPartola 7y ago

Unrelated: it took me until this very moment to realize that hipmunk is chipmunk without the C. Is this the origin of the name and I am literally the last to figure it out?

ludwigvan 7y ago
You are definitely not the last since I hadn’t realized it either :)

bradleyjg 7y ago

Did all the people at Hipmunk immediately quit? If not how come SAP Concur (TM) 's web interface still looks, works, and feels like something out of the IE6 era?

starky 7y ago
Exactly my question when I learned through this post that Hipmunk is owned by Concur. The Concur flight search is the worst I've ever used. It feels like you have a better chance at winning the lottery than Concur's search actually showing you the flight that you want to take (that I already found on another website (usually Hipmunk)).

einpoklum 7y ago

This makes me wonder... how should I compare all these flight search sites? I mean, you may notice one has some feature another don't, but is there something more methodical?

midgetjones 7y ago

They keep talking about access to data, but not what's happening to the data itself. Is it being deleted? Sold?

homakov 7y ago

Google Flights as my go-to option. Unparalleled speed, can iterate over 10 days with click of a button.

bitL 7y ago

How much does running a service like Hipmunk cost? It might not be a good business for the current owner, but it could be profitable for e.g. company of four people. Wouldn't it be better to give it back to Huffman and run it as a small project?