Off-topic: I have been a long-time Kayak user, but don't see many people mention it hear when discussing Hipmunk. Does anyone feel strongly that one of the competitors is better than Kayak? If so, could you elaborate?
I have occasionally used Google Flights, but it seemed to have fewer knobs and I could not find any features that made me want to stay. The only competitors I have consistently but rarely used is Skiplagged, since it performs a kind of search (of somewhat dubious morals) that can't be done with Kayak.
A big part of what made Kayak good was that it was (is?) a solid data product - basically a gigantic farm of scrapers and crawlers glommed together with direct-from-provider (airline, hotel etc) data ingestion pipelines and coherence protocols that flowed into massive unified local cache databases. All this to ensure that you, as a customer, saw the most up to date and widest variety of information possible.
When Kayak IPO'd, it was around the time that ITA software (massive airline data provider you've never heard of) got sold to google, and there was a lot of hand wringing over whether this'd spell the end for Kayak. But even then it looks like ITA supplied only 42% of flight data (check out the S1 filing https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1312928/000119312510...), the rest from other data providers (Amadeus etc), online travel agencies, or individual airlines.
So given that, Hipmunk's focus on "we're gonna make the UX so much better" was admirable (especially given the state of a lot of the competition), and it pushed everyone to do better in that regard, but always felt a bit naive as a business strategy to me, since I think most people will pick the site with the slightly worse UI and better / cheaper / non-stale flights rather than the other way round. Especially in a non-premium race to the bottom industry like online tickets. And getting quality data takes a big team and lots of money and infrastructure, as well as lots of business relationships.
But I always thought they were a cut above a lot of the other competitors which were bad UIs mangled with dozens of ads thrown together in a slapshod way on top of the same 1-2 data providers.
Thanks! I have the vague impression that there are fewer stale or missing flights on Kayak than competitors, but I haven't done a bunch of comparisons recently, so I'm very interested in what others think.
But those are estimates and not the final prices displayed after you pick the date. If you specifically want the cheapest date, the grid is barely useful. ITA matrix usually does a better job.
I just opened Kayak for the first time in a LONG time.
- I don't like the rows and rows of panels trying to get me to go to other pages or see their guides.
- I want a search focused page.
- I don't like how when I click search, it automatically opens up cheapoair.
- I don't like how the results page starts with a modal asking me to setup a price alert.
Thanks. I basically agree with those complaints. For what it's worth Kayak will stop automatically opening up comparisons like CheapOAir if you uncheck the box once, and it seems to remember that preference. I think the price alert modal is also a one-time thing.
I like skiplagged's price graph, which I didn't realize until now kayak has too. Skiplagged shows it in the search result, while kayak shows it only on the front page.
I'll miss hipmunk's time chart when trying to plan flights.
Yea, I do wish Kayak had this,
on the search page (although they do have a color-coded grid illustrating how prices change if you adjusted your dates +-3 days).
It's been a couple of years since I did much air travel. When I did, hipmunk's sort was much better than Kayak's. Kayak was my favorite before hipmunk opened. Once hipmunk came along, I tended to use both when searching for flights, just to see if a better deal popped up on one but not the other.
You mean you liked the criteria by which Hipmunk sorted flights, e.g., by accounting for layover time rather than just by price? If so, not that Kayak has a "Best" sort (which didn't exist when Hipmunk appeared) that's now the default.
I have occasionally used Google Flights, but it seemed to have fewer knobs and I could not find any features that made me want to stay. The only competitors I have consistently but rarely used is Skiplagged, since it performs a kind of search (of somewhat dubious morals) that can't be done with Kayak.