Interview: Hipmunk CEO on the Product Versus Marketing Quandary

Editor’s Note: Skift is publishing a series of interviews with online travel CEOs talking about the Future of Travel Booking, and the evolving habits and device preferences of travel consumers. Check out all the interviews as they come out here. Travel metasearch site Hipmunk burst on the scene in 2010 with a product that took some of the agony out of flight and later hotel search. Hipmunk co-founder and CEO Adam Goldstein believes that the most successful companies in travel have done a good job in both product and marketing, "and a great job in one." As with its Agony index that drew initial attention, Hipmunk's emphasis to date has been on the product side of the equation. For example, with Hipmunk Anywhere, which debuted in March 2014, users who are signed into Hipmunk's desktop or mobile apps can find their recent searches on each device regardless if they initiated them on the desktop or mobile Web, Android or iOS apps, or tablets. The company has also implemented direct booking within Hipmunk in a way that differs from how most of its competitors are handling it. Skift discussed the future of travel booking and related issues with Goldstein. An edited version of the interview follows: Skift: In the travel booking game, does quality win or do marketing dollars win? Goldstein: Well, I think both can win. It's a big industry. You can see a lot of companies out there that win on marketing dollars and you can see a lot of companies that win on quality. And you can see companies that win at both. I think even if you just look at the supplier side of things there is a huge disparity in the amount of bookings that happen direct to supplier for the different airlines and different hotel chains. Sometimes it is because the websites and the apps are especially good and other times it is because they focus a lot of their marketing effort on driving direct transac