I like the idea behind Hipmunk, but it doesn't really work with how I personally pick travel.<p>I generally have an airline in mind first. If I want to fly to Seattle, I basically know my choices are VX, UA, AK. If I want to fly to Hong Kong, I'll try hard to be on CX, or failing that, SQ, or UA (to use the eBayed SWU to be in business for +$300 over cheap coach). To Kuwait, UA or LH.<p>Alternatively, I want to know "when will flights to (exotic destination) be cheap" -- the best choice for that is still Kayak. Flyer Talk is also a good source of information, because when an airline runs a 3x miles qualifying special, a $500 transpac costs about $0 if you value the miles to hit a tier.<p>If I need to fly at specific times, it's usually bounded on one side -- get from point A to point B either leaving as late as possible or arriving as early as possible. Longer layovers aren't a big deal, so it's search for the relevant time first, then optimize.<p>For hotels, it's the same thing -- I know of a specific hotel I want to use (Pen or MO or one of the good SPG properties in BKK), or I'm trying to maximize SPG status/points and shop Starwood, or want to find something as cheap/deal as possible (usually Vegas). Couch-of-friend or AirBnB also come in, especially if the preliminary hotel search fails. I rarely care where in a city I'm staying as much as the property itself.<p>There clearly is something better than the current travel sites, but for me, Hipmunk isn't it (yet).
Hipmunk has the best interface of any travel site, and displays the same information in a easily understandable page than other sites take 15 pages to do so - but I've always been able to find cheaper prices elsewhere. Sometimes much cheaper!<p>If the pricing isn't right, than it's algorithims get thrown of to, so some flights which are better and cheaper aren't even displayed as it will have instead display some other flight which Hipmunk for some reason thinks is cheaper and so displays that instead.<p>The hipmunk interface is light years ahead of everyone else in terms of displaying information - but flights and pricing - not so much. I wish it was though, as I hate booking through sites like expedia where you have to fill out 15 gazillion things each time and it's a pain to compare different flights.
I don't doubt the sincerity of his own fondness of the site, but I still don't see why people continue to pretend that travel search is a pain point. Am I the only one who has no problem understanding travel search on Kayak and Bing? Travel search is a solved problem.
I've tried Hipmunk several times because I feel like I should like it, and though I agree it has some great UI elements, I've never found a flight I've wanted through it. It just amazes me that it's still so hard to get quick and decent-enough results with semi-ambiguous depart/arrival dates. Though it's not perfect, Adioso.com i would say is the best flight search site I've seen for this (and find myself constantly going back to it because of this particular feature). It very quickly accepts ambiguous search terms, then quickly displays a nice price graph. As soon as I select a depart date, it jumps me to the return date price graph (if it's a return trip), and I'm done.<p>I just tried the price graph feature in Hipmunk, and I set my "outbound date" easily enough, but I can't for the life of me find how to choose my inbound flights?!<p>Edit: I just figured it out. I need to click on the plus to the right of the # of days selection to add +- days to consider. I'm not entirely sure this is intuitive or necessary?
I love Hipmunks interface, but it usually fails at finding the cheapest available price.<p>I've used flightfox.com, a crowd sourced flight finding service, a few times and I've been surprisingly impressed each time. The guys on that site have found me some incredibly cheap flights that I have no idea at all how they found. I've saved a ton of money using it.<p>It's great to pay someone a small amount of money to handle the pain in the ass that searching for flights is.
> <i>George Orwell said journalism is “printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.”</i><p>Orwell? I'm pretty sure it was Lord Northcliffe (founder of the Daily Mail in late 19th century) who said <i>"News is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising."</i>
Bing Travel: <a href="http://www.bing.com/travel/" rel="nofollow">http://www.bing.com/travel/</a> (aka FareCast) is my personal favorite.<p>Their price predictor for certain routes is quite accurate.
Hipmunk serves a niche within the industry by providing travel and flight info in a unique way, and they do it well. As the story notes, they won't necessarily find the cheapest flight or present the most flight options. I think it is a good case study of a service succeeding in a narrow segment as opposed to trying to be the end-all, be-all provider.
The comments here are more negative than I expected (because my sense is there is a lot of positive Hipmunk love/hype/PR going around and it is a YC darling). Anyway, just an observation. I too have tried to use HM at travel booking time and so far have never found or booked a flight through it.
<i>The winners from here on out will the ones who make the Web functional and simple.</i><p>On a site with lots of ads (including a popup ad), social media "sharing links", a sidebar with unrelated content, and persistent top- and bottom bars.
I'd like to recommend Dohop (<a href="http://www.dohop.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.dohop.com</a>).
We try our best to not only get the cheapest prices but to also display the complete price, that is, including potential credit-card fees, booking fees etc.<p>We also have a nice affiliate-service where you can set up your own Dohop-powered flight-search engine on your site and customize it to your liking. (<a href="http://whitelabel.dohop.com/" rel="nofollow">http://whitelabel.dohop.com/</a>)<p>Dislaimer: I work for Dohop (if you hadn't already guessed it).
Hipmunk has a great interface but is totally unusable for one reason: they don't list all flights.<p>This may have changed since the last time I checked (within the past year), but Kayak would list many more flights than Hipmunk would. Until they have data for ALL flights, what's the point?<p>Kayak is pretty awesome. The one feature I'd like them to add is a filter for flight duration. I can -sort- by duration, but I can't tell it to just ignore 15+ hour journeys when it's showing me ~8 hour journeys.
As a hacker, for me, the best airline search website would be something that presents all available flights as a gigantic SQL table (or set of tables) so I could just type in a SQL query:<p>select * from
allflights f
where start = 'London'
and end = 'Chicago'
and roundtrip = true
and airline in ('American', 'Virgin')
etc.
For me there's Southwest, and everything else that's usually much more expensive. So I won't be using Hipmunk much for air. I also find Southwest's interface to be excellent. I really like Hipmunk's hotel search.
The fact is that Hipmunk is oriented for people searching shorts travels (cabotage) meanwhile the competence (AKA Kayak, Expedia, etc) offers best options for longs travel (for example, for holidays).
Proof that kitsch can get you pretty far. But it's time for this site to start refining the visuals a bit.<p>I count seven different font sizes on the home page alone.
It's not even close to the world's best travel site. I've looked at it before - maybe it's good in America but outside the results are bizarre.<p>I̶ ̶j̶u̶s̶t̶ ̶t̶r̶i̶e̶d̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶a̶g̶a̶i̶n̶ ̶-̶ ̶S̶y̶d̶n̶e̶y̶ ̶(̶S̶Y̶D̶)̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶S̶a̶p̶p̶o̶r̶o̶ ̶(̶C̶T̶S̶)̶ ̶m̶i̶d̶ ̶s̶e̶p̶t̶e̶m̶b̶e̶r̶.̶ ̶J̶u̶s̶t̶ ̶g̶o̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶q̶a̶n̶t̶a̶s̶.̶c̶o̶m̶ ̶d̶i̶r̶e̶c̶t̶l̶y̶ ̶g̶i̶v̶e̶s̶ ̶m̶e̶ ̶~̶$̶1̶1̶0̶0̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶t̶u̶r̶n̶ ̶f̶l̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ ̶-̶ ̶h̶i̶p̶m̶u̶n̶k̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶d̶o̶ ̶b̶e̶t̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶n̶ ̶~̶$̶1̶3̶5̶0̶.̶ ̶G̶r̶e̶a̶t̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶r̶t̶.̶ (edited - prices have changed since yesterday and my criticism is no longer valid)<p>OK, so I am thinking of going over to the old country, SYD-LHR mid october. That's a long flight, I want at least premium economy - wtf, I can't even specify that on hipmunk! Well, that search is over even before it begun. I am sorry but a travel site that doesn't know what premium economy is is literally useless.<p>I don't want to sound like a dick. This stuff must be hard. But World's Best Travel Site? Are you kidding? How about learning "chopsticks" before you claim you're the greatest pianist in history?<p>(edit - the sapporo price changed under me in the last few hours, rendering my comment pretty void, right now at least. What I said about no prem econ stands, though. I'm a tall guy, and I'll flat-out refuse an economy flight more than 8 hours. Business is very expensive if I'm on my own money. Premium economy is a lifesaver to me. It needs to be on the site, yesterday)
Hipmunk is good but not the best. Price and choice is still a huge factor for many consumers and Hipmunk still falls short on that front many a time.<p>Each aggregator has it's own unique advantages which have to be considered... Google is super fast with amazing flexible fare options, Kayak often finds amazing hacker fares and Bing's price predictions are very valuable. Combined they would make a formidable site...<p>Is there a solution? we believe there is... - www.Cheapflightsfinder.com is a new site that allows you to compare all of them - Hipmunk, Kayak, Google flights, Bing and many more in seconds - we call it meta-meta search and in our opinion it is the best way to make the most powerful search of all... Try it out - we think you will be glad you did.<p>Shah Sid (CEO - Cheapflightsfinder.com)
Where is talk about www.skyscanner.com?
What is better?<p>Perform entire month or year searches, choose things like ANY NYC or EVERYWHERE as a destination or departure.<p>I have saved hundreds on EVERYWHERE searches.
If you can just get into a region like Europe or South East Asia then you can take advantage of their cheap rail systems andor internal flights.<p>The interface has cluttered over its evolution but it still runs better than Hipmunk on a low resource box andor low bandwidth.