Featured in Time's "50 Websites That Make The Web Great", Hipmunk is a travel portal with a difference.
Customer
Among the worldwide audience of 130,000 visitors per month, a median Hipmunk user is a computer-savvy male in his 30s or 40s with an income of $75K-99K.
Service
Customer
Among the worldwide audience of 130,000 visitors per month, a median Hipmunk user is a computer-savvy male in his 30s or 40s with an income of $75K-99K.
Service
- The flight search is designed to reduce agony and the hotel search is designed to increase ecstasy. Agony is a combination of price, duration, and number of stops. Ecstasy is a combination of price, amenities, and reviews.
- The tab-based display of onward and return flight searches and hotel search makes it extremely convenient to manage the three bookings.
- In the flight search page, a few flights are hidden because Hipmunk believes that choice is less important than time. The basic philosophy is to really simplify the travel booking process by reducing the number of decisions to be taken.
- The use of colour-coded visualizations and schedule based display, that can be integrated with Google Calendar saves time for the customer.
- The hotel booking page takes into account the kind of neighbourhood one is seeking such as romantic, family, etc. This is quite a value addition.
- Hotel portal also has a cool feature called heatmap, which highlights neighbourhood hotspots for walkability. The business version of the website allows travel agents to suggest flights for business travellers by integrating with their calendar and get approval from them to book the flight.
- Also, Hipmunk is completely ad-free.
Business Model
Hipmunk directs hotel and flight purchase traffic to airlines, hotels and other travel-search sites and collects a per purchase margin from them.
Technology
ITA software's QPX solution, used by Bing, Kayak, and TripAdvisor, powers Hipmunk. QPX has a highly configurable XML interface, which empowers customers to enter complex search queries.
The website has been programmed using the highly readable Python on a Tornado web-server framework, which can handle a large number of requests per second.
Hipmunk directs hotel and flight purchase traffic to airlines, hotels and other travel-search sites and collects a per purchase margin from them.
Technology
ITA software's QPX solution, used by Bing, Kayak, and TripAdvisor, powers Hipmunk. QPX has a highly configurable XML interface, which empowers customers to enter complex search queries.
The website has been programmed using the highly readable Python on a Tornado web-server framework, which can handle a large number of requests per second.
