There is definitely no shortage of sites where travelers can search for and book flights online. However, most of these flight search sites can be unfriendly and intimidating. Users are bombarded with a plethora of useless information, webpages become too cluttered and difficult to understand, and users would rather just go somewhere else for helpful information.
Hipmunk, a flight search tool “with a twist”, reports all the information you need in user-friendly charts of possible flights. Instead of flooding users with an all-text interface, Hipmunk organizes useful information such as travel time, layovers, and price and reports the information as useful visuals. Hovering or clicking on any flight gives users the full details and other specific options.
When founders Steve Huffman and Adam Goldstein thought of creating a travel search startup, they understood the difficulties of purchasing tickets online. The long hours of booking flights makes some people wonder if they are traveling in the first place. Huffman boasts that Hipmunk is so much better than other booking sites because of a single, simple, and clean interface where users can easily see and compare flights. Hipmunk also removes undesirable listings, as much as 70% off, while allowing users to plug in their preferred airlines to always appear in the results. Additionally, results can be sorted by price, number of stops, departure/arrival time, and duration. The founders have also termed a metric that they call “Agony”. Agony refers basically to the total distress you will experience in terms of time and money. Agony is a combined function of price, duration, and number of stops.
Huffman, who co-founded Reddit five years ago, recommends startups to anyone really interested in doing it. There’s nothing to waste but time, and there’s a whole lot of experience to gain and new friends to make along the way. Adam Goldstein is a co-founder of BookTour. Marketing by means of social media has proven successful innumerable times. Hipmunk’s simple and user-friendly interface is just one way of making service more social, a key aspect to social media, and all other advanced Internet marketing strategies.