Hipmunk Co-Founders Debut Next-Gen Flight Search Tool to Skirt Online Travel 'Collusion'
Skift Take
A new business model shall set you free. That's the underpinning of Flight Penguin, with the former Hipmunk gang vowing to overturn the coziness between online travel players and their big-spending partners. Google, Kayak and Expedia have nothing to fear; they will hardly notice.
Think of it as an online travel confessional, and a make-good project. The co-founders of flight search engine Hipmunk, a darling of Silicon Valley and flight power users until its demise last year, have debuted a next-generation flight search tool that seeks to sidestep the partner "collusion" that is rife in online travel.
Hipmunk co-founders Adam Goldstein, an angel investor, and Steve Huffman, who's the Reddit CEO, provided seed funding for Flight Penguin, and vow to take zero money in commissions or incentives from airlines, online travel agencies or anyone else — except subscribers to their new $10 per month service.
Don't look for a functional website or a mobile app; the Flight Penguin link above merely goes to an informational landing and registration page. Flight Penguin will operate by design as a Chrome extension, taking a page from a browser-based plug-in that metasearch pioneer Sidestep likewise initially offered more than two decades ago.
One of the reasons for the Chrome extension is that users perform the searches on airline, online travel agency, metasearch, and consolidator websites from their own computing devices, and not from servers in a Flight Penguin office. In this way, they may be able to access fares that
