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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.subst

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.)
  - iamaelephant 7y ago
    Of course not, because it's absolutely ridiculous. The theory doesn't pass the basic smell test, it utterly defies common sense. I don't know if this user is a shill for some retailer or just extremely gullible, but this kind of absurd misinformation shouldn't be welcome on this website.
    - johntiger1 7y ago
      Thanks for this opinion, was wondering how the GP was able to justify such a corporate-philic line of thinking
  - Jasper_ 7y ago
    The industry of mobile apps and games has seen rates go unsustainably low, often to 99c or free, causing them to make up the difference with in-app purchases, ad networks, tracking, and lots and lots of psychological tricks. Nobody can dare simply sell a game on the iOS or Google Play store for $5 or $10 anymore, because there's far more "free" ones out there. This has turned lots of people off of these storefronts. The race to the bottom is real.
    - danaris 7y ago
      > Nobody can dare simply sell a game on the iOS or Google Play store for $5 or $10 anymore Except that's patently false. All you have to do is look briefly on the iOS App Store and you'll find plenty of games for $5+. Sure, there are a lot more that are "free (with in-app purchases)", but the idea that no one can make money in the space is just totally absurd. Furthermore, even if what you said was true, it would not be a genuine example of what the previous poster was describing, because people are still making money off those freemium games. What the other poster was describing was prices going through the floor, no one being able to make money in that space, and the entire industry drying up and blowing away.
cglong 7y ago
I tried Hipmunk once because I loved the site's personality, but it wasn't able to find any flights on Delta to Atlanta (Delta's primary hub). As much as I liked the site, the inability to find such a basic route made me lose confidence in it from the start :(
- jzwinck 7y ago
  I tried delta.com but it wasn't able to find some international flights on their own alliance airlines. I called them about this and they confirmed this is done deliberately when booking using points. This made me lose confidence in delta.com and I went back to using Skyscanner. (Yes it's basically a scam that their "partner" airline flights are hidden when buying with points.)
  - velosol 7y ago
    Are you otherwise able to purchase those legs with points?
    - jzwinck 7y ago
      If your points are with Air France (another airline in the same "partnership") I believe you can. And if your points are with the exact same carrier as the flights you also can. But apparently points on one "partner" are not fungible with others, and you can't use Delta miles to book award flights on other carriers' websites. This was when I found out that frequent flyer experts choose their "home" airline very carefully. To Delta's credit their points never expire...but if they block the flights I want what good are the points? Their website offered me an alternative: fly with a different partner airline into the destination country then fly domestic on the airline that flies to the actual destination. That was bookable using (a lot of) points, but would make the journey twice as long.
dmix 7y ago
> after the wave of consolidation among airlines during the Obama years, Ah the "too big to fail" years where everything consolidated and only got bigger including the big evil banks which took the brunt of the public's fury following the 2008 crisis (and occupy). It's funny how so much of the regulations put in place had the opposite effect and made running small firms (ie, with more liability than the big ones) became almost impossible. Following the crisis there are now 5 mega banks who control everything and tons of the small banks shutdown and found it impossible to operate in the market with the new conditions, It's sad that most people's consumer-interfacing perception of markets is often through these megacorps which exist in heavily regulated systems (which everyone then blames their poor experiences on markets), which are often structures which were the result of reactions to bad behaviours of a few big bad guys, which then resulted in policy only designed for the big bad firms. Meanwhile the other 90% of the marketplace, who did nothing wrong and who aren't the same size, were left dealing with the new overhead. Automotive, airlines, finance, energy, bio/pharma, etc are all getting consolidating into smaller and smaller groups of megafirms or owned by opaque equity groups. I don't know what the solution is but in so much of dystopian fiction the world is run by a few giant companies who control everything. That sort of system naturally creates a greater disconnect between the needs of the average consumer using the service and the whims and needs of the company (for ex: boycotts become meaningless/ineffective and consumer power lessens). Meanwhile data is showing the number of new businesses being created are lessening and people are wondering why inequality keeps increasing, when forming small/medium sized companies used to be the main way to become upwardly mobile. Soon the only option for upwards mobility is working your way up megacorps or making small companies who just get sold off to a bigger firm within the first 10yrs of operations. I don't mean for this to be a diatribe against regulations but this sort of thing concerns me and regulation is only one of many forces pushing the economy towards this structure. I still think entrepreneurship is forever underrated in inequality discussions but its such a complex problem to confront, I just hope that the future really isn't just endless consolidation and an endless series of political barriers put in place preventing new shops from improving the mistakes of the past (which was a reliable source of progress for a long time).
- majormajor 7y ago
  I don't understand you using consolidation and abuse of power as a reason to dislike regulation. There are plenty of non-regulatory incentives for consolidation. Why not simply regulate consolidation? Target large holding companies and megacorps with aggressive taxation policies on revenue or headcount or market cap or similar? And then enforce the regulation with teeth? There are always going to be creative people coming up with new ways to be bad actors, so regulation has to be an evolving constant. But responding with an aversion to regulation is just giving the game to the bad actors.
rmason 7y ago
I loved the design of Hipmunk and really wanted it to work. Tried it for a direct flight from Detroit to SF. I think it showed only a single flight. I then went to Delta's site and found a half dozen. After a couple more tries on different trips I decided that whatever Hipmunk's algorithm was optimizing for just didn't work for me.
wiggler00m 7y ago
Can anyone explain the issue of hiding fares in more detail? Which fares? Where? When? Why?
ck425 7y ago
I'm not sure that's true. I worked for a flight meta search for years and that was never mentioned by anyone (we were very candid internally). It is however true that consolidation of airlines gave them more bargaining power. For already established companies with access to a lot of customers (Kayak, Skyscanner, Google Flights etc) that came with pros and cons. But for smaller players like Hipmunk I can easily see how that would shift the balance of power towards the airlines, lowering margins and access to data.
ng7j5d9 7y ago
I think to offer a differentiated product in this space, you have to be hostile towards the airlines. I know that Skiplagged will show me hidden city tickets that I won't find elsewhere. I know that Scott's Cheap Flights will alert me to fares so cheap that they seem like pricing mistakes. All of the aggregators that play ball with the airlines just offer the exact same results.

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.)
- iamaelephant 7y ago
  Of course not, because it's absolutely ridiculous. The theory doesn't pass the basic smell test, it utterly defies common sense. I don't know if this user is a shill for some retailer or just extremely gullible, but this kind of absurd misinformation shouldn't be welcome on this website.
  - johntiger1 7y ago
    Thanks for this opinion, was wondering how the GP was able to justify such a corporate-philic line of thinking
- Jasper_ 7y ago
  The industry of mobile apps and games has seen rates go unsustainably low, often to 99c or free, causing them to make up the difference with in-app purchases, ad networks, tracking, and lots and lots of psychological tricks. Nobody can dare simply sell a game on the iOS or Google Play store for $5 or $10 anymore, because there's far more "free" ones out there. This has turned lots of people off of these storefronts. The race to the bottom is real.
  - danaris 7y ago
    > Nobody can dare simply sell a game on the iOS or Google Play store for $5 or $10 anymore Except that's patently false. All you have to do is look briefly on the iOS App Store and you'll find plenty of games for $5+. Sure, there are a lot more that are "free (with in-app purchases)", but the idea that no one can make money in the space is just totally absurd. Furthermore, even if what you said was true, it would not be a genuine example of what the previous poster was describing, because people are still making money off those freemium games. What the other poster was describing was prices going through the floor, no one being able to make money in that space, and the entire industry drying up and blowing away.

cglong 7y ago

I tried Hipmunk once because I loved the site's personality, but it wasn't able to find any flights on Delta to Atlanta (Delta's primary hub). As much as I liked the site, the inability to find such a basic route made me lose confidence in it from the start :(

jzwinck 7y ago
I tried delta.com but it wasn't able to find some international flights on their own alliance airlines. I called them about this and they confirmed this is done deliberately when booking using points. This made me lose confidence in delta.com and I went back to using Skyscanner. (Yes it's basically a scam that their "partner" airline flights are hidden when buying with points.)
- velosol 7y ago
  Are you otherwise able to purchase those legs with points?
  - jzwinck 7y ago
    If your points are with Air France (another airline in the same "partnership") I believe you can. And if your points are with the exact same carrier as the flights you also can. But apparently points on one "partner" are not fungible with others, and you can't use Delta miles to book award flights on other carriers' websites. This was when I found out that frequent flyer experts choose their "home" airline very carefully. To Delta's credit their points never expire...but if they block the flights I want what good are the points? Their website offered me an alternative: fly with a different partner airline into the destination country then fly domestic on the airline that flies to the actual destination. That was bookable using (a lot of) points, but would make the journey twice as long.

dmix 7y ago

> after the wave of consolidation among airlines during the Obama years, Ah the "too big to fail" years where everything consolidated and only got bigger including the big evil banks which took the brunt of the public's fury following the 2008 crisis (and occupy). It's funny how so much of the regulations put in place had the opposite effect and made running small firms (ie, with more liability than the big ones) became almost impossible. Following the crisis there are now 5 mega banks who control everything and tons of the small banks shutdown and found it impossible to operate in the market with the new conditions, It's sad that most people's consumer-interfacing perception of markets is often through these megacorps which exist in heavily regulated systems (which everyone then blames their poor experiences on markets), which are often structures which were the result of reactions to bad behaviours of a few big bad guys, which then resulted in policy only designed for the big bad firms. Meanwhile the other 90% of the marketplace, who did nothing wrong and who aren't the same size, were left dealing with the new overhead. Automotive, airlines, finance, energy, bio/pharma, etc are all getting consolidating into smaller and smaller groups of megafirms or owned by opaque equity groups. I don't know what the solution is but in so much of dystopian fiction the world is run by a few giant companies who control everything. That sort of system naturally creates a greater disconnect between the needs of the average consumer using the service and the whims and needs of the company (for ex: boycotts become meaningless/ineffective and consumer power lessens). Meanwhile data is showing the number of new businesses being created are lessening and people are wondering why inequality keeps increasing, when forming small/medium sized companies used to be the main way to become upwardly mobile. Soon the only option for upwards mobility is working your way up megacorps or making small companies who just get sold off to a bigger firm within the first 10yrs of operations. I don't mean for this to be a diatribe against regulations but this sort of thing concerns me and regulation is only one of many forces pushing the economy towards this structure. I still think entrepreneurship is forever underrated in inequality discussions but its such a complex problem to confront, I just hope that the future really isn't just endless consolidation and an endless series of political barriers put in place preventing new shops from improving the mistakes of the past (which was a reliable source of progress for a long time).

majormajor 7y ago
I don't understand you using consolidation and abuse of power as a reason to dislike regulation. There are plenty of non-regulatory incentives for consolidation. Why not simply regulate consolidation? Target large holding companies and megacorps with aggressive taxation policies on revenue or headcount or market cap or similar? And then enforce the regulation with teeth? There are always going to be creative people coming up with new ways to be bad actors, so regulation has to be an evolving constant. But responding with an aversion to regulation is just giving the game to the bad actors.

rmason 7y ago

I loved the design of Hipmunk and really wanted it to work. Tried it for a direct flight from Detroit to SF. I think it showed only a single flight. I then went to Delta's site and found a half dozen. After a couple more tries on different trips I decided that whatever Hipmunk's algorithm was optimizing for just didn't work for me.

wiggler00m 7y ago

Can anyone explain the issue of hiding fares in more detail? Which fares? Where? When? Why?

ck425 7y ago

I'm not sure that's true. I worked for a flight meta search for years and that was never mentioned by anyone (we were very candid internally). It is however true that consolidation of airlines gave them more bargaining power. For already established companies with access to a lot of customers (Kayak, Skyscanner, Google Flights etc) that came with pros and cons. But for smaller players like Hipmunk I can easily see how that would shift the balance of power towards the airlines, lowering margins and access to data.

ng7j5d9 7y ago

I think to offer a differentiated product in this space, you have to be hostile towards the airlines. I know that Skiplagged will show me hidden city tickets that I won't find elsewhere. I know that Scott's Cheap Flights will alert me to fares so cheap that they seem like pricing mistakes. All of the aggregators that play ball with the airlines just offer the exact same results.