Given the hype growing around Hipmunk, I'm surprised that none of the current players (i.e. kayak) have responded. Hipmunk's main innovation is the UI - if you were Kayak, and you already had a backend in place, wouldn't you assign at least one designer/developer to play around with novel UIs? Maybe launch a site on a different domain that can act as an R&D and marketing testbed for a new type of search engine?
It astounds me how lazy these companies appear to be (from the outside of course). A new hot startup launches, and they don't even lift a finger as a counter measure. Even when the upstart has proven that there is more to be desired out of a typical airline search site.
if you were Kayak, and you already had a backend in place, wouldn't you assign at least one designer/developer to play around with novel UIs?
What's to say the current players haven't already tried those UI changes and found them less usable by the general population?
I don't know for sure, but I do know that calling the current competitors lazy is the completely wrong view (and factually incorrect). First, they deal with an older, less "techie" audience, which means different UIs are immediately viewed as confusing rather than cool. Second, they have the traffic to run A/B tests on everything, which allows them to know what such changes will do to their bottom line without having to publicly deploy or announce them.
Full disclosure: I worked on TripAdvisor Flights and was in the same YC batch as Hipmunk, though there was no overlap between the two and I actively avoided mixing the two circles, so I don't actually know anything about how Hipmunk views TA and vice-versa.
"A new hot startup launches, and they don't even lift a finger as a counter measure."
Probably because they don't think it's an improvement and they think it will go out of business on its own if they ignore it. This is what happens to most 'hot' startups anyway, and if Hipmunk is able to beat the odds then I doubt it will be because of their current UI.That's not to knock Hipmunk at all, I just think you need to lengthen your arc a little on this.
Large corporations are physically incapable of doing that (most of them, anyway). Who does the lone designer report to? Who gets him integration support from dev and ops? Who has to jump out a window when he clocks the upgrade that VP Marketing spent $400 million on last year because he liked the color scheme? (Hint: highly unlikely to be VP Marketing.)
Oftentimes it's because the innovations that the startup pioneers have hidden costs that become prohibitive with the big company's scale and consumer base. It's easy to prototype a feature, which is basically what a startup is. It's much harder to predict that feature's impact on all the other features in the system. Oftentimes those same new innovations have already been tried and rejected by the big companies because they result in unacceptable quality losses elsewhere.
Occasionally, the startup is right, and consumers care more about the innovations that they introduce than the features that conflict with them. In that case, the startup displaces the big company and doesn't remain a startup for long. But more often, as the startup grows, they run into the same issues that led the big company to reject the innovation in the first place. At that point, they hit a brick wall in their growth, and they either have to become lame like the big company or forego the users that need those conflicting features.
This is just my subjective opinion, but that seems a bit overvalued to me. I have no doubt that hipmunk will be successful, but after raising that amount, the amount of success they must see is going to have to be pretty large. If they had not raised that amount, a 10 mill exit would be great. But if you raise 7 and exit for 10, it doesn't look very impressive.
I hope they gain the technological or businesses assets to make them worth tens of millions, it seems like that is what would guarantee such a large raise.
Nor should you. I was meaning to ask, though, when are your prices going to match everyone else's? I did some travelling around New Years, and found your prices were $580 whereas your competitor's (forget who) was $510. That pissed me off, as I really wanted to book through you guys. Your site is fantastic, but at the end of the day money talks.
It was a WestJet flight from Vancouver to Calgary, leaving (I believe) Dec 30 and returning Jan 3. I bought the tickets on the 26th or 27th. Not sure of the flight number itself.
Nah, it wasn't. I remember them saying something about doing search through another agency so as to have access to all flights, but the flight in question wasn't even listed on hipmunk. It seems to be better now. Now I just have to convince people to use it. Speaking of which, if they can figure out how to let people buy on points that'd be fantastic. Not sure if the airlines have made that API available, but it would be great.
I think I've booked at least 10 flights thru Hipmunk. Much easier system for the business traveler to understand and plan.
$7mil in this market for seasoned entrepenuers with a product making over 100k a month (their numbers via recent interviews)... not a bad business to invest in.
Congrats to the folks at Hipmunk. I've always really liked the simplicity of this idea for travel search.
I do wonder, however, how long they'll be able to continue to link directly to the airlines. I'm assuming (and this may be an overly broad generalization) that as they build out features for users this will naturally force them to create interstitial's between the carrier's website and their own. I seem to recall that Kayak was very similar in terms of its relationship with carriers when they initially started. But as they built out more functionality they created more for the user to do on their site distracting them away from the carrier site.
So although TechCrunch thinks it interesting that American isn't cutting out Hipmunk is this really going to be true in the long run?
I think so, for financial reasons. AA cut themselves out to cut costs. Orbitz and other similar services were (from what I heard) overcharging AA for referral costs. Naturally, I think Hipmunk and AA simply have a deal that won't really hurt AA.
I can see hipmunk fetching way more than 10 million, if they decide to sell. It addresses a huge paint point in sites people have little brand loyalty because people hop around for deals to airlines they _do_ have brand loyalty for anyways. Hipmunk is 10x easier to use with all the same deals on those sites, and they are creating brand loyalty with a cute chipmunk. #win
Initially I loved HipMunk but I came to find out the agenda they use in hiding flights does not mirror my preferences.
One recent example I was travelling from Detroit to LAX with my 94 year old father and I wanted a direct flight. HipMunk showed nothing but Delta.com showed four daily flights. Sure they were more expensive but I gladly paid the premium because my dad is too old to be running between gates.
No amount of sorting showed those flights on HipMunk. Maybe if they have the money they can build a preference layer.
I love Hipmunk and have used it to buy tickets to as far away as India and Tokyo to as close as LAX. Buying international flights is usually an incredibly stressful process for me as there are so many different options, and in my past few flights to Shanghai booking on Kayak has always ended up sending me to chase flights that don't exist anymore.
Hipmunk removes that stress for me -- seriously awesome.
Can someone explain the image? So it's the hipmunk chipmunk stalking somebody in a kayak... Surface great airfare... EDIT: Wait, I get it. Setting sights on kayak.com. :)
Hipmunk has a great interface, though I'm afraid I don't always trust it to find the cheapest flights just yet. Frinstance I asked it for a flight from Sydney to Melbourne on Feb 10, and the cheapest hipmunk could get me was a Virgin Blue flight for $241 -- rather expensive for this route. Checking directly on the Virgin Blue site I found fares as low as $81 on exactly the same flight.
I've never had similar problems with flights with at least one end in the US though.
The cost of just existing in this space is very high, let alone competing in it. We're a small operation now, but we've got a long way to go, and it won't be this way for long.
Indeed, airline availability is not an easy business to get into and is expensive to maintain. Most of our nodes are dedicated to pricing and low fare search.
It astounds me how lazy these companies appear to be (from the outside of course). A new hot startup launches, and they don't even lift a finger as a counter measure. Even when the upstart has proven that there is more to be desired out of a typical airline search site.