Booking flights is always a problem for some. Reading a lot of text one sometimes gets confused and may give and go outside and drive to a nearest agency to lessen the hassle. Not anymore with the flight search service of Hipmunk! The website makes it easier for travel shoppers to book flights in a very colorful format that anyone could understand at one glance. It also allows travelers to also book hotels for them to stay at every flight and even find car rentals with ease. Hipmunk flight searches are easy, the traveler types in where he or she would start and then the destination to find any flights available. Usually website flight services will list a whole lot of flights and the traveler clicks page after page trying to find the right flight either time, cost or preference airline service. What Hipmunk does is allow the filtering of bad choices and reducing the time a traveler has to dig all through the flights that they don’t need.
The first of its kind flight search website is the brainchild of 22 year old Adam Goldstein. Being an MIT graduate in electrical engineering and computer science really helped and his contacts with Y Combinator founders Jessica Livingston and Paul Graham has its perks. He also knows the founder of O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly . Prior to Hipmunk, Goldstein co-founded the website BookTour with Wired editor Chris Anderson. BookTour is a website for authors assisting them with book promotions. Goldstein is also a smart guy, he claims to have saved money since he was 16 so that when he will be starting his own company, he won’t be loaning out his salary for seven years.
Goldstein says his experience in booking the flight schedules of the MIT debate team for nearly four years was “incredibly painful” saying that he would sometimes spend hours using search flights website Kayak, Orbitz and Expedia. The Hipmunk website was designed trying to fill in the missing pieces offered by those flight search websites out there. Still, the website is in its infancy and even Goldstein admits that there are services that are still lacking. Golstein say he will be focusing on the consumers in growing Himpunk and that they’ll be working day by day in making the website a success.
Andriel, New Zealand
Love it. A true “why hasn’t anyone done this?” moment for me. If they can expand the range of providers to be competitive with Kayak and Skyscanner I’d make this my first and only stop.
Speaking of travel visualizations… a shameless plug for my own “Hotels.com hotels on Google Maps” site Live prices in the markers, Street View and Wikipedia placemarks.