Startup Hipmunk builds innovative flight-search site

There’s no shortage of travel sites on the Web, but I find the experience of searching for flights is still pretty crummy. I have to hold lots of little details in my head as I sort through a bunch of flight listings that are often almost identical.

That’s where a new San Francisco startup called Hipmunk comes in. Cofounder Adam Goldstein says Hipmunk’s goal was to “rethink the interface from scratch,” and I’m quite impressed with the results. Users enter the same query that they would on most other sites — origin, destination, departure date, and return date. But instead of giving you a long list of results, Hipmunk lays the flights out on a grid, where flight time is shown on the horizontal axis and flight price is shown on the vertical axis. That means you can see a lot more flights at once, and if you’re interested in flights in a particular time period or price range, you can focus on them right away.

Hipmunk offers other cool features. It removes some of the clutter from your results by hiding “worse” flights — i.e., flights that are basically the same as another result, but cost more, include more stops, leave earlier in the morning, arrive later at night, and so on. It lets you sort flights by price, number of stops, departure or arrival time, duration, or using a concept called “agony,” which is a combination of price, duration, and number of stops.

The company is being incubated by Y Combinator. It’s also funded by Ron Conway’s SV Angel. Cofounder Steve Huffman already has one popular Y Combinator startup under his belt — social news aggregator Reddit. Goldstein, meanwhile, just graduated from MIT and said he was a frequent traveler as part of the debate team, which led to his frustration with existing flight search services.

Similar to Kayak, Hipmunk doesn’t sell tickets directly and instead directs users to sites where they can purchase flights. For now, it’s limited to tickets sold by Orbitz, but it plans to expand its sources.

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  • http://twitter.com/ElixirIncubator Duncan McFadzean

    Looks great but I struggled to book a flight returning the same day, and on a main UK domestic route. It's nice to see a refreshing change to the interface in this field.

  • http://www.tripware.com/ Tripware

    I work for Tripware and it amazes me that start-ups that offer a slight twist on an interface get so much press; perhaps because it is associated with Y Combinator? Tripware OutBook integrates fully with Microsoft Outlook and allows travelers to plan, book, and organize travel directly within a Microsoft Outlook calendar window. Tripware MoBook is the only iPhone and iPad app that allows travelers to book hotels, cars, AND flights directly from an app. Sure I'm biased, but when it comes to innovation, Tripware should be mentioned more often.

  • reizliza

    Actually hipmunk is now online and it is looking not that good. Hipmunk Early Impressions

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