Hipmunk? I'm Barely Getting Used to Kayak. Technology Marches On!

In fact I am barely getting used to using travel sites in the first place. I guess I was raised in a time when you had to go to a travel agent to buy a ticket. Those days are long dead but this new site called Hipmunk sounds pretty interesting. Here is a link to their website. They have a cute mascot but too bad it couldn't be Flying Ratty or something like that.

Hipmunk, which just raised $4.2 million from a roster of online travel veterans and venture capitalists, gives users access to the familiar airline fares they’re used to on other sites. But the company has a slick visual interface that arrays all of the travel options for a given trip on a grid that shows the hours of day along one axis. Each airfare is represented by a rectangle (color-coded for each airline), the length of which is determined by the duration of the trip, layovers included.

The layout makes it easier to see lots of airfare options at a glance. But another key feature of Hipmunk is its method of ranking the most attractive travel options according to an “agony score.”

The selections all in a grid delineated by time is really nice. Normally you have to scroll through like 20 pages of flights in order to pick out the one that I want. I hate having to be at the airport for a flight at 0-dark-30 to get on a plane leaving at 8am or something. I hate it so much that I would actually pay extra to avoid it. Also this "agony score" will hopefully help me avoid the 5 minute dead sprint from Terminal A to Terminal D that sometimes occurs when a plane is slightly late to arrive.

This Hipmunk site makes it easy to check when flights come and go without having to search through a bunch of pages like on Kayak. The article also mentions Kayak potentially going public.

According to a filing with securities regulators for a possible initial public offering, Kayak said “advertising and other” revenue accounted for 57.9% of its $128 million in revenue during the first nine months of 2010, while referral fees from travel partners accounted 42.1% of that figure.

I guess those extra pages of results gooses that 57.9% of revenue figure. I guess they want you to look through 25 pages in order to have a place to host 25 ad impressions. In any case Kayak might be a very interesting stock going forward but I have to look at more financials to see if that is true.