| Type | Private company |
|---|---|
| Industry | Software, Travel, Internet |
| Founded | 2010 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, USA |
| Key people | Adam Goldstein, CEO Steve Huffman, Co-founder |
| Products | Software |
| Employees | 10 |
| Website | hipmunk.com |
Hipmunk is an online consumer oriented travel company, headquartered in San Francisco, CA. It was co-founded by Adam Goldstein and Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman in 2010.[1]
The company addresses visual organization of flight search results.[2] It received increased media attention when Google announced its flight search service in September 2011.[3][4]
Hipmunk presents search results in a timeline, based on time of day, on one page. Moreover, the search engine ranks the flights by price, schedule, and "agony", a score based on factors such as duration of the flight and number of stops. The search engine offers its own ranking of hotels. The results can be filtered by “Price”, “Reviews”, and even “Ecstasy”. Aside from hotels, the service looks up airbnb results[5] and sorts relevant train routes provided by Amtrak.[6]
The search engine redirects users to Orbitz to purchase flight tickets. In the case of American Airlines, which does not provide its flight data to Orbitz, Hipmunk redirects users to the airline's website.[7][8] Southwest Airlines also does not provide its fares to Hipmunk.
The company makes money by collecting commissions for directing flight and hotel purchase traffic to airlines, hotels, and other travel-search sites. For example Orbitz pays Hipmunk its standard rate of $3 per flight sold.[9]
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Hipmunk launched in August 2010 after Steve Huffman and Adam Goldstein had been working together for nearly three months during Y Combinator's Summer 2010 class. Alexis Ohanian joined the team days before the launch.[11] At this time, Hipmunk relied on Orbitz to get its flight data, but in November 2010, the company signed a deal to use ITA Software's QPX Solution. Currently, all the major U.S. travel search engines, such as Kayak, FareCompare, Bing, and TripAdvisor, are powered by ITA.[12]
In February 2011 Hipmunk introduced an iPhone app, followed by an iPad-dedicated app four months later.[13][14] Time magazine included Hipmunk in its list of "The 50 Best Websites of 2011"[15] Hipmunk is programmed using Python and Tornado and rents infrastructure from Amazon EC2[16]
In August 2011, Hipmunk passed one million. search queries per month.[17]
Hipmunk has a worldwide audience of 130,000 visitors per month according to DoubleClick Ad Planner. They generate around 900,000 page views.[18] The median Hipmunk user is a male, 35-44 years of age, has a Bachelor's degree, and is making a middle-range income of $75,000-$99,000. According to the report, the top audience interests are venture capital, development tools, and travel agencies and services, suggesting a computer savvy demographic and culture.
In his role as marketing director, Alexis Ohanian directed the Hipmunk Me project, which allowed Facebook fans to request hand-rendered Hipmunkifications of their profile photo. During this campaign, the company’s Facebook fan base grew by more than 500 percent[19] .
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