Why I don't use recent travel startups

http://blog.mozio.com/why-the-recent-wave-of-travel-startups-are-mo

by dlitwak • 14 years ago

72 40 14 years ago

blog.mozio.com

eof• 14 years ago

Hrm.. I don't use any social travel whatevers; but I have used hipmunk exclusively to look for flights since the first time I ever tried it.

It is an order of magnitude better than kayak/priceline/whatever.

Putting down hipmunk before launching when you are going to compete with them with weak arguments like "sure its good but I use something inferior anyway"--seems.. transparent.

dlitwak9• 14 years ago

I admitted it was a good service, my commentary was focused on why I don't use it, and the reason is it isn't different enough to break my habit.

I have been told many times that you can't build a business to compete with the major players by being 5% better than them. You need to be 5x better than them, otherwise people won't switch. That is my point, and for me, I realized that the visualization of time data is not what bothers me every time I go to Kayak, so I wasn't really prone to switching.

I am merely trying to provide a little bit of introspection . . . and I guess I don't know what you expect. Yes we are putting out a travel product soon, but that doesn't invalidate my opinion on what is out there, and there is a reason a large portion of people still use Expedia etc. . . .

martey• 14 years ago

"Putting down hipmunk before launching when you are going to compete with them..."

I argue that this is the main problem with the entire blog post. I would rather than Mozio actually showed why they are better than all of the social travel startups they mention, as opposed to disparaging them while their own homepage links to a Launchrock signup page.

dlitwak9• 14 years ago

We aren't social travel martey. Never said we were. The post was about the entire travel industry. We barely mention our own project in the post exactly because we thought it would take away from the argument: we aren't making a sales pitch or trying to sell anything as we aren't in the social travel discovery space and aren't really catering to the same market as hipmunk (we are targeting budget travelers who want to compare buses, trains, the backpacker type).

gameshot911• 14 years ago

For me the main appeal of Hipmunk's interface is that it makes it easy to use 'soft' search parameters.

Every travel agency will let you search for flights based on price range, departure time, arrival time, and layover time. However, I usually don't care if a flight leaves at 5 or 4:45, or I'm willing to pay an extra $20 if it means my layover is reduced by an hour. With a normal search interface I'd either have to do multiple searches, or relax the limits of all the parameters and have to sort though a large breadth of results. On top of this, the results are presented in such a way that I need to consider a single variable at a time ("hmm okay this flight leaves a bit earlier, but it costs __ and arrives at ___. This flight has a minimal layover, but it leaves at ___ and costs ___").

In contrast, the interface Hipmunk has developed makes it exceedingly easy to view all the variables at once, and to quickly narrow down flights I'd potentially be interested in. Not only is the timeline interface much easier to understand than say expedia's "sort results by one variable at a time", but it's an intuitive way to compare the overall utility of multiple flights at once. And since at the end of the day that's exactly what I'm looking for in a travel website - an intuitive way to quickly compare numerous options and choose the 'best' one according to my personal heuristics - I use Hipmunk when I need to book a flight.

spravin• 14 years ago

When I look for flights, I check bing, kayak, orbitz as well as hipmunk. Which one do I prefer? Simple: the one that gives me the best fare. Unfortunately it ends up being a different one each time.

zalew• 14 years ago

exactly. also http://momondo.com and http://skyscanner.net

But on mobile https://market.android.com/details?id=com.hipmunk.android "This app is incompatible with your Play HTC HTC Wildfire.". Well, all other work, I don't see a reason why a form to search results via an api shouldn't work on ANY device.

dkrich2• 14 years ago

Agreed. Although I really like Farecaster on Bing. To me, statistical analysis of historical prices is a lot more important to visualize than travel times.

smackfu• 14 years ago

Agreed. Hipmunk tries to be a good interface when there are a dozen similarly priced flights to choose from, but in my experience, there is one carrier with good prices and good connections for a given route, and then choosing which of their two flight options for a given day is easy enough with Kayak's tools.

amorphid• 14 years ago

I like Kayak, too. Hipmunk is neat, but it's almost too slick. I essentially want to know the price, departure time, and arrival time. Everything beyond that doesn't really add much. What I'd love too see is something that simply allows me to see the cheapest flight between too points without having to put in the travel dates.

calbear813• 14 years ago

Without dates, do you mean you're flexible and you just want to see the best price in the next 60 days or something? Kayak explore might work (kayak.com/explore)

brd• 14 years ago

I could be mistaken here but pushing out negative marketing before you release your product seems like an awfully bad idea for a startup. This isn't the kind of attention you want and you run the risk of completely turning off potential customers who are currently fans of the services you're frowning upon.

dlitwak9• 14 years ago

not trying to trash anyone brd, and this is a statement from my perspective on why I don't use them. I never said any service was awful, it is merely my perspective on why I, as an avid traveler, feel no impetus to become an avid user.

robryan• 14 years ago

If they found the current options to be great there wouldn't be a lot of motivation to start their alternative.

sliverstorm• 14 years ago

Your parents' argument is that coming right out of the gate publicly putting down your competitors may not be the best way to enter the race.

vgurgov• 14 years ago

i am so happy someone finally said this about Hipmunk! i can sign for every word in this.

about me: i travel across the globe 1-4 times a month. see absolutely no reason to prefer it to kayak

i found that some YC-hardcore fans of hipmunk that love-love-love it travel few times/year at most.

adebelov• 14 years ago

@vgurgov, guess who inspired @dlitwak to post this? :)

silverlight• 14 years ago

I just have to say that I have never tried any of these other tools, but lumping Hipmunk in with them is doing it a disservice. It's not about social travel or any other gimmick -- it's about better travel searches. Period.

I've used it the last 3 times I've booked a flight, and I would never use anything else. It makes it so easy to get the flight we prefer it's ridiculous.

dlitwak9• 14 years ago

I agree, but the title of the blog post is why I don't use them. I don't use Hipmunk. I don't use many of these new services, all for different reasons. I don't use Hipmunk not because its useless, far from it, but because my habit is to use Kayak, and I guess for the type of travel searches I do on a regular basis, I don't see a reason to switch.

dkrich2• 14 years ago

Awesome post. I'm in 100% agreement with the author. It takes courage to write an analysis like this, knowing that there are some high-profile people backing Hipmunk, which in turn causes a lot of people on HN to defend it as well.

The first time I read about Hipmunk solving "the problem of travel search", the first thought I had was "what problem?" I looked at Hipmunk and I couldn't see what it did that was so radically better than Kayak, which I think actually does a great job. If there are people who enjoy Hipmunk, then I say fantastic, but to me, travel search is not actually broken.

In the comments section I wrote what I believed to be a well-reasoned comment making similar comments to those made in the OP's post and was promptly downvoted and even received a sarcastic response from one of the founders. No big deal, but after close to a year, I still maintain that what I said was valid. Sometimes I think people get stuck working aggressively on a problem before they really confront the reality of whether the problem is real or an illusion that was created in order to build a business.

That said, I do think the site looks great and I hope it does phenomenally well. I don't have any ill-will towards the company or its founders, but I'm just not convinced that this is a startup that is built to solve its users' problems. It seems that a lot of successful smart people proclaimed that travel search was a major problem and that this was the solution, and that in turn got the business a lot of support. I'm just not convinced.

dlitwak9• 14 years ago

Thansk dkrich. What I find pretty funny is that I definitely complimented hipmunk. Pretty sure I said it was useful and had a wonderful interface haha. I never insulted them but merely stated the reason why I don't use it. But for some reason not being head over heels in love with the product, having something slightly critical to say gets people incredibly defensive.

I also don't have any ill will towards Hipmunk, I think the product looks great. But yes, I also agree that, for flights, travel isn't 'broken' so badly. If it was, Hipmunk would be overflowing with users. Last article I read they were having trouble attracting new users.

Now for other forms of transportation . . . I'm going to have to disagree with you that travel isn't broken.

calbear813• 14 years ago

I do also agree with a lot of what the Mozio blogger mentioned, especially in regards to using a sledgehammer when a chisel would do just fine. I do however, especially given my position at a travel focused startup, think it's good that there is so much support and funding given to try and make the travel search space better. I know people from all three of the startups mentioned and they are each trying to tackle what they see as shortcomings in the current state of travel.

Social introduced a new opportunity to tap your friends for travel recommendations and tips but there lacked that follow up (hence Trippy which allows those who suggest places for you to visit to get updates when you check into those locations) that is so satisfying. It answers the question "so did you go to that place ..." when the trip is happening and not after.

Hipmunk is doing a lot of interesting things like integrating AirBnB listings and also revealing heatmaps for which areas of cities have the things people like to do like eat, party, vice, etc. so they know where they should be looking for a convenient hotel.

Gogobot, in my opinion, is better just layered on Facebook but they probably have the best chance of doing a better social recommendation algorithm given their leadership position in the space so I'm looking forward to seeing what comes out of that.

Since the Kayak launch waaaaay back, there really hasn't been that much travel startup innovation. If anything, the landscape has gotten more confusing and worst for consumers in my opinion. The average user checks over 3+ sites before booking because they just don't know where they can find the best prices. There's so much focus on monetization that everywhere you turn, you get pop-ups and more pop-ups and by the time you're done, you're not even sure how you ended up on the site you are on to buy your ticket, book your hotel, etc.

Over at our startup, Room 77, we are focused on a real travel search problem specifically in the hotel space. There's too much price fragmentation and the current solutions today aren't satisfying to us. For example, everyone offers a "best price guarantee" but everyone has a different price, so who's lying and who's telling the truth? Sites that claim to search all the other hotel sites show you 3 prices and then a bunch of links that open pop-ups to other sites. How is that a great user experience? We see a lot of opportunity to provide true price transparency in hotel search w/o compromising the user experience. Would love to get your feedback on our site, we've recently focused more on pricing transparency and less on our unique hotel layout and rooms database information.

I'm excited there's so much discussion on this travel related thread and happy to respond more when I get home later. Although I'm immersed in the hotel space now, I was part of the team at Farecast that became Bing Travel (fare predictions) so I can provide some insight there as well.

AznHisoka• 14 years ago

Hipmunk can't survive with just tech startup buzz/YC kool-aid. They need to do actual TV advertisements or aggressive Adwords. And forget about relying on search engines because the other players got a 8-10 year head start in that area...

dlitwak9• 14 years ago

I think they are cool enough that they will get enough funding to be able to compete with the big players. But that is precisely my point, they aren't different enough that they will attract organic traffic from people saying 'wow, my kayak experience was truly awful, let me try an alternative service'. They are better, so perhaps a gradual migration will occur, but yes, I think with the product they have not being different enough, they need to pursue some aggressive advertising etc.

calbear813• 14 years ago

I've been seeing some more Hipmunk ads on Google and they have some billboards on the 101 freeway in the Bay Area. Unfortunately, air search is a low margin business so it's hard to get aggressive on advertising and expect to break even w/o the ability to upsell to packages like the online travel agencies do.

peteforde• 14 years ago

I think it's darkly amusing that someone from a pre-launch travel startup (that could only generously be described as a "feature not a product") would blog about how Hipmunk is all rounded corners and Ashton Kutcher. I have no affiliation to any of these companies except that I'm a HN regular who used to use Kayak and then immediately, intuitively saw that Hipmunk was a vastly more useable experience. Do I think I'm absolutely right? No, because it's deeply subjective. Vive la différence.

Generally I'm immediately wary of any negative post that starts off with a disclaimer about how much respect the author has for the soon-to-be casualties of their rant. You're all buds, but you have no idea why their business needs to exist. Right.

People roll the bones on all sorts of dumb-sounding concepts, and yet we're all still humbled every time there's a big win and we didn't built it. So here's to hoping I'm wrong about nobody having a Mozio-shaped hole in their lives, right? Respect!

dlitwak9• 14 years ago

Apparently Hipmunk is a soft spot here . . . it is definitely curious that no one has vehemently defended any of the other startups. I wonder if it would have elicited the same response if I had criticized Expedia or some company that wasn't so dear to the YC community.

I'm also a bit surprised at all the presumably "startup" people who feel the need to lecture me on being a young upstart who doesn't know what he's talking about, with an unlaunched product, who supposedly knows better. Oh the irony of a bunch of people who rock the boat for a living jumping down the throat of a kid who has the audacity to criticize. It seems that criticism of the big bad companies is ok, criticism of one of our own, not so much.

Again, the article is from my perspective, on why I don't use it. You can say what you please about how intuitive it is and all the reasons why, but I don't use it, and I was trying to give some insight as to why. And I don't appreciate you making it seem like I don't respect Hipmunk, i made it abundantly clear I thought they had a wonderful product, I merely described why I didn't use it, and it seems like I'm not the only one who feels that way.

I'll ignore the quip about my own project haha.

wdewind• 14 years ago

I totally disagree about the usefulness of the Hipmunk interface: visualizing it is exactly what I need because for $X dollars I'm wiling to wake up a little earlier, or get in a little later and the opposite.

The reason I no longer use Hipmunk is that every ticket I've gotten from them (4 round trips total) has been standby, and I was never told that when I bought it. I was moved to a later flight because I was standby on the last one and the experience was soiled for me.

emeltzer• 14 years ago

disclosure: i'm currently selling a printed map (kickstarter.com/projects/1147214836/toc-guide-to-sf)

I think social data is much more useful as a filter for a curated list than it is when used on the set of ALL establishments in a city.

If the list is prefiltered to only include establishments that are at least excellent examples of whatever they are trying to be, social data is a useful way to figure out what to show the user.

Seeing what places my friends have been going to is much much less useful to me than a carefully assembled list of excellent places. For a great example of this, see "Tokyo by Tokyo." _much_ better than any social algorithmic solution can currently do.

pchristensen• 14 years ago

Let me put in a plug for the toc-guide-to-sf. It's a really smart, useful project.

Here's that link again: kickstarter.com/projects/1147214836/toc-guide-to-sf

tnuc• 14 years ago

The Hipmunk write up is more or less what I think of it.

The data it presents is great. It looks great, nice bells and whistles.

But it doesn't really improve over kayak. In fact it is slower and in some ways less useful. There is still a lot of room for improvement in the flight booking space.

adsyoung• 14 years ago

My favourite travel startup is Adioso.com because they focus on simply finding you the cheapest flight whether you are looking to go somewhere specific or just anywhere international. Direct and to the point, no pointless social features.

guelo• 14 years ago

The airlines are not going to let anyone fix the big problems in ticket search because they create those problems on purpose to get more revenue. Things like knowing whether you should wait to buy the ticket at a lower price, comparing total price including baggage and other fees, searching across all airlines including those that are not listed with the main data providers. Until someone figures these things out there's nothing to see in this space besides the gimmicky features we see now.

sudoscience• 14 years ago

I hope this doesn't come across as too negative, but I think it is pretty strange for a blog of a travel aggregator site to say other travel aggregator sites are essentially worthless. Either it stinks of bias or the conclusion is that Mozio is just as non-game-changing and unworthy as these other sites.

FWIW I agree with the trying-too-hard aspect of forcing the square peg of social into a round hole sometimes, but the visualization of Hipmunk is better than Kayak. (I don't use Hipmunk to purchase because I find flights to be significantly cheaper direct from the airlines, however.) If you were used to Hipmunk you would also be loathe to change to new technologies that were marginally, but noticeably better. It is the nature of human "comfort cost" and the reason why poorer, older products still retain customers, at least for some period of time.

dlitwak9• 14 years ago

Please point out where in the post I said that these other travel aggregator sites are "essentially worthless". I'd really like to know. If I recall I merely pointed out that I don't see it as noticeably better than kayak. I'm pretty sure this is a direct quote: "Hipmunk is a useful product . . . I want to make that clear."

yason• 14 years ago

I must say I didn't even know of this "social travel" thing. I've heard of some of those startups before but I've probably just dismissed them right off the bat if they didn't happen to immediately give me not only a good answer but a good problem, too.

What I usually do is find the cheapest offers for flights from a few selected places such as Hipmunk, Kayak, Ebookers and Momondo, and then proceed to find accommodation by myself. I have a few known places in certain cities already, found empirically and if I don't, I'll just search the web until I find a place I like. And that's pretty much it when it comes to travel.

What would make travel better, I don't know. The availability and access to good offers and good information over internet generally pretty much did it, I think.

jasonjei• 14 years ago

I didn't see anything disruptive about Hipmunk. ITA Software's Matrix UI and iOS app are already excellent. Isn't Hipmunk already using ITA anyway for data?

kapitalx• 14 years ago

Ah, Google flight search though has shown me that you can innovate in flight search. http://google.com/flights (don't forget to click on the little graph icon next to the "return date"

adamtmca• 14 years ago

Am I missing some nuance in hipmunk's interface?

I've always thought hipmunk was basically indistinguishable from ITA Matrix flight search (do a search and click "view time bars" to see what I mean) and ITA has been around forever.

Why I don't use recent travel startups

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