Friday, August 27, 2010

Hipmunk helps with lower air fare

It started out as a simple summer project for young Adam Goldstein, and now Hipmunk may be the most innovative way for an online flight search. Goldstein got a little bit of help from friend and Reddit co-founder, Steve Huffman. This was how they came up with the new site. In strokes of brilliant color and user-friendly interface arrangement, Goldstein may have just painted his way to the big time.

Hipmunk changes online travel

Flights are easy to see with the color Hipmunk adds to the list of flights. Hipmunk just launched this week, but tech industry reviews are glowing. TechCrunch writes that “When you see the results you’ll never want to see flight results in any other format.” The team spent a lot of time on how the look of Hipmunk is perceived, which is said by Lifehacker to be “fantastic” which pleases Goldstein. Airlines are arranged and color coded rather than having a cluster of text. To get more info, searchers can zoom to specific grids.

Maybe winning with ‘a small, cute animal and a good logo’

Huffman and Goldstein got together and checked out numerous online flight booking sites before making a decision to deal with one. Orbitz was the one that is most popular they decided to go with. Flights found on Hipmunk are booked via Orbitz and both online websites benefit monetarily from the transaction. Hipmunk’s logo is just a simple chipmunk that has flight goggles on it, comparable to Twitter with the bluebird. Goldstein’s girlfriend, as outlined by CNN, chose the mascot.

Of course, Goldstein says, “She said, ‘If you pick a small, cute animal and a good logo you’ll never go wrong.’”

Beginning to prepare for the winter storm

Hipmunk is nevertheless in the early process of its evolution and is stockpiling ideas for how to improve. Expanding search functions is something Goldstein would like to do. He’d also like to stop spam from hitting users each time they get on. Expanding into hotels and auto rentals may be a likely move. It could be interesting to see how Hipmunk maintains its Zen-like design as additional content is added to the user experience. It is much less frustrating to search for a flight now though.

Further reading

CNN

money.cnn.com/2010/08/19/technology/hipmunk/

Hipmunk

hipmunk.com/



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