Hipmunk: A customer experience driven innovation of online flight booking

The online travel and flight booking space is one of the most competitive market environments. In a market like this, existing players focus solely on optimization and innovation mostly happens by outsiders or startups that challenge the status quo.

Hipmunk.com, a new online flight booking site, is such a challenger that aims to revolutionize the online flight booking experience with a simple but radical innovation. Hipmunk is also a prime example for “obviousness” of radical innovations. Once you understand it, you ask yourself why nobody in the world had this obvious idea before.

The Killer Feature: Sort by Agony

The killer feature of Hipmunk is its sort feature. Instead of just focusing on price, it also includes agony as a sort feature. Hipmunk co-founder, Adam Goldstein, shared the motivation for the startup with me:

"The cheapest way to fly somewhere often involves multiple layovers and long flights, which is agonizing. It doesn’t make sense to take the cheapest flight if you can save hours of time by spending only a few extra dollars!

We decided to make the assumption that our users’ time is worth something, so we ended up creating ‘agony’ as a composite metric of the stuff that matters (price, duration, number of stops, etc.).

Fun fact: we originally called it ’suckage,’ but decided that was a little too coarse."

Here is a screenshot of search result visualization. In this example you can see the cheapest flight from Zurich to New York costs $578 but takes 14 hours and includes two stopovers. The flight with Continental is just $30 more expensive but cuts down the travel time to 9 hours without stopovers. Saving 5 hours for just $30 more – I would say that is a good deal.

Small improvement, large impact – it’s awesome

The Hipmunk algorithm is technically not a huge improvement, but from an experience perspective it leads to a significant improvement of the customer booking and travel experience. Instead of just focusing on the lowest price, Hipmunk makes trips transparent and brings another dimension to online flight booking. See how you will save money and reduce agony on your next trip at www.hipmunk.com.