Hipmunk, the funky and hip flight search engine is set to make a splash in the flight sector. Brainchild of Adam Goldstein (an MIT graduate) and Reddit founder Steve Huffman, Hipmunk delivers a clean and useful interface for searching for flights. Users use a Spartan interface and enter standard details such airport codes, cities and dates and after scraping the US travel site Orbitz Hipmunk returns the results.
Instantly, travellers can see flights represented as bars of time which include layovers. Flights can be sorted by price, departure time and so on but also by “agony” which is a combination of price, stop overs and total travel duration. Everything’s all on one page and it’s very visual; there is not a complicated click-through table in sight. There are no any ads cluttering the user experience leaving just pure hard data represented in a user friendly and useful fashion. There are just 14 buttons on the homepage so it couldn’t be simpler.
It’s a simple but powerful idea, and is executed beautifully. Revenue has been steadily coming in with latest figures reportedly to be in the region of $50,000 per day in its first week. Extra features have been rolled out which include auto complete (useful for when you can’t remember airport codes) and tabs allowing even easier access to multiple itineraries, which is extremely useful for comparing different trips. Most recently, Hipmunk has announced that Alexis Ohanian (another Reddit partner) is on board.
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