Hipmunk has been an excellent flight search tool, the best I have found as of a few years ago. Shockingly better than most of the rest of them back when it started, in terms of being able to understand and choose among numerous choices.<p>Unfortunately, that was then and this is now. Several of the airlines have dropped out of participating in flight comparison sites, and those that do apparently pay staggeringly little per referral. This is greatly eroded the usefulness of Hipmunk and similar sites, and taken away the motivation for anyone to pressure airlines to participate. Why bother when the most you can win is a tiny sliver?<p>I wish there is a way to simply pay a little money to get a comprehensive high quality comparison of all available flights from all airlines. I don't want AI, I don't want a travel agent to do it for me. I most definitely don't want to visit multiple airline websites and try to manually compare the offerings. I just want to see all of the different ways to get from point A to point B, in a well engineered graphical representation, all at once so I can quickly and effectively choose the best fit. I would love if there was a way to simply pay some dollars to do so.
Anyone have insight into the sale price?<p>Hipmunk raised $55M over 7 rounds [1] and had 51 employees [2].<p>[1] <a href="https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/hipmunk#/entity" rel="nofollow">https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/hipmunk#/entity</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.hipmunk.com/about" rel="nofollow">https://www.hipmunk.com/about</a>
Concur's core product is shockingly awful. My company recently switched to it, and I don't know anyone who actually uses it. Most of us have figured out we get lower prices and less hassle by just ordering directly from the airlines / hotels and booking them to or corporate credit cards. If you're in a hurry, we can just call AmEx travel and pay $30 for them to book the trip for us using their travel agent terminals -- which of course have every flight from every airline. The end result is usually that we pay more for our travel and our company loses control; but honestly Concur's application crashes 90% of the time I try to use it with JavaScript errors, so I'm not sure it's really a viable solution in the first place.<p>The problem, of course, is the commoditization of the airline industry. Leisure travelers are, at this point, loss leaders that fill empty seats for their real business: consultants and sales people who travel 50-100+ flights a year. The industry is overly reliant on an increasingly shrinking segment of business travelers who fly on higher-fare tickets and often on short notice, so it does everything it can to make that kind of travel very painful UNLESS you do it all with a single airline and use full-fare tickets. If you thought air travel was unbearable on your last vacation, imagine how bad it is to do that 3 or 4 times a week -- so you try to consolidate to get a few perks like early boarding, lounge access or first class upgrades (<i>nobody</i> pays for domestic first class -- they're almost always loyalty upgrades).<p>So the real problem is that the airlines don't care at all about your $200 flight to Tampa to visit granny. They have to fill the seats to pay off the leases on the airplanes, but they make almost zero margin off of you because leisure travelers are so price-conscious. Business travelers are willing to pay an extra $300 for the ability to cancel their ticket on short notice, and often carry less baggage and cost less to serve. So the airlines try to lock in those types of customers with loyalty programs (which are so scaled back as to be nearly worthless unless you fly over 125 segments a year -- roughly 3 flights a week, every week of the year that's not a holiday), by making it harder to comparison shop, etc. and screw the little guys.
Hipmunk and Google Flights are my two go-to tools these days for beginning the search for flight tickets. I use Hipmunk when I know where I want to go and when, and I use Google Flights when I know I want to take a trip, but I'm flexible about both when and where.
Congrats to the Hipmunk team! I've been using Hipmunk since the beginning, and have found it to be a pleasant way to search for flights. They obviously care a lot about creating a good experience for the customer, which is a lot more than I can say about the big travel sites.<p>I hope that the team had a nice exit, and that they continue to develop Hipmunk within Concur.
Concur feels like an odd company to acquire them, but maybe it's to streamline business travel?<p>Also -- I recently used Hipmunk (been using it for a few years now), but found that it didn't find deals that <i>Chase's rewards portal</i> found, which I thought was terribly odd (why would a rewards portal find better deals?).
what a shame... I've always loved Hipmunk and its "sort by agony" filter. I have to use Concur at work and I think it's pretty rubbish.
The killer feature of Hipmunk for some of us is the ability to understand some of the ITA Matrix codes and so it's one of the platforms to book an interesting itinerary put together on the Matrix. (If you are interested in this, there is an up-and-coming service which tries to do same called bookwithmatrix and there's a userscript maintained on flyertalk adding booking links to the ITA Matrix itself.)
Hipmunk was cool when it first came out but I haven't used anything besides Google flight search in years. The speed of the interface alone justifies it.<p>It's either that or book directly from the site if it involves doing something special (ex: award travel).
A flight search engine that I would be interested in:<p>The craziest routing.<p>Instead flying for USD 700 A->Destination or A->B>Destination
Fly A->C>D>E>F>G>Destination
My sincere condolences to all the option holding employees of Hipmunk who will not likely get back what they gave up in salary (due to liquidation preferences and the like, they will be lucky if they get anything, other than golden handcuffs.)<p>20 years and no equity has taught me that next time I do a start up, I want restricted stock, not options, with an exercise price of $0.01. Or founder stock. In fact, I think the only way to do a startup is a founder (unless you're just starting out.)