Hipmunk is a flight search tool with a twist, and even if you don’t travel as much as I do you should give it a try next time you’re taking a trip somewhere. (It’s hard to describe, but easy to use.) As announced elsewhere, I’m happy to be part of a group of people supporting the team as an investor.
What would really help to bring even more context into those agony charts could be a sort of “benchmark/direct travel time.” For example, if you didn’t know that flying directly from SMF to SAN only takes about an hour and a half, you might think that a 3-4 hr flight through United with a stop in LAX would be a good deal when it is a huge pain in the —! Same goes for flying from the west to the east coast… *should* take about 5-6 hours direct, but once you add a couple of connections in between, that becomes a pain, too. It would be interesting to see the actual time comparison between what airlines are offering vs. how short the best flight could have been (ie. “Your booked flight will commute for 9hrs, 3hrs longer than the non-stop/better flight”) .
This is very interesting especially when traveling intercontinental with multiple stopovers involved. Your travel agent or airline my try their best to put you on a specific flight that they say will ‘benefit’ you, but hipmunk will show several options that gives you a better picture. This is particularly useful when you’re in an emergency and you have to arrive ASAP at the other side of the globe.
Thanks for sharing, Matt. Greetings from Indonesia.
looks gr8
This is simply amazing, so nice & clean and very thoughtfully designed! Thanks for the tipp, even though i am from Germany this might come in handy!
Here is a little video I created explaining Hipmunk.
The guys at Hipmunk really liked it!
video -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6teBPUgz4Y8
This is a beautiful site. Take a look at a graphic by Dan Rope that I reproduced in my book, The Grammar of Graphics (Springer, 2005). It’s on my Web site at:
http://www.cs.uic.edu/~wilkinson/nViZn/airline.jpg
Dan shopped it around to Orbitz and Expedia in the late 1990’s , but they were not interested.
The only difference between Hipmunk and Dan’s UI is that Dan ordered the bars by price rather than ranking them on the vertical axis. The Hipmunk layout avoids collisions but does not give a sense of the price differences.