Articles tagged “hipmunk”

This Skift Trends Report traces some of the seminal shifts of 2014, from the dramatic rise in mobile bookings to same-day hotel- booking trends and marketing trends that impact mobile development.

Yahoo Travel opted to reach a deal with a search site, Hipmunk, which means in some cases users will have to navigate to Hipmunk and then navigate again to an online travel agency, airline or hotel site to complete their bookings. A little clunky, although Hipmunk also provides direct bookings on Hipmunk.com in some instances.

Getting more aggressive in hotels is a natural fit for Yelp, although it remains to be seen how far Yelp intends to take it.

A legion of brand advocates and a focus on product and mobile alone won't be enough to take Hipmunk over the top. It is a dilemma it shares with many startups. How do you compete against the likes of Priceline/Kayak with that $61 billion market cap?

As the Boston Consulting Group-Facebook study points out, companies such as Delta and Hipmunk, which lag their peers in desktop traffic, can make up a lot of ground in mobile. Hey, it's a whole new ballgame.

2014 is turning out to be a consolidation year, with big getting bigger. But there is lots of interesting jostling beyond leaders, and that's where the action will be rest of the year. Airbnb's rise has been spectacular, and will continue to break through on the charts.

Hipmunk is hoping that the funding will help it avoid the fate of Room 77, which also struggled to break out of the pack, and withdrew. Hipmunk is going to keep at it for awhile, but it has a tough road ahead of it given well-funded competitors such as Kayak, TripAdvisor, Google, and Trivago.

In a few years, the streamlined, cross-platform searching that Hipmunk and Expedia are creating will be taken for granted because any company worth anything will have to offer it. So far Hipmunk Anywhere is more intuitive than Expedia's Scratchpad with fewer clicks or taps, but these are very early days.

The global travel industry is going through a lot of disruption, and the biggest sectors include the sharing economy and ground transportation, as well as one large potential winner in the hotel booking sector.

Hipmunk seems content to keep its nose to the grindstone and invest in its platforms. How long it can be viable as a smaller player in an increasingly croweded marketplace remains to be seen.