Articles tagged “hipmunk”

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.

Do you want great hotel rates for tonight, or do you want all the rates for tonight that are available on mobile? Hipmunk is banking on its belief that travelers will go for the latter so they don't have to hop around from app to app.

Funded, lean and focused, Hipmunk can take its sweet, little time honing its product to get ready for a larger profile. Whether it ever emerges from beautiful product to major player is a very open question. There is plenty of money to be made even as a relatively small company, but Hipmunk's ambitions are huge.

Americans can brace themselves for crowded highways and busy airports this week, but the good news is that travel is consistently more congested during Thanksgiving than the December holidays.

"Neighborhood" is the buzzword for online travel sites this week, but it’s too soon to tell whether it’s a stroke of genius for catering to mobile travelers looking for localized content or very expensive dead end.

Hipmunk has a lot of funding in the kitty. With Kourosh Karimkhany's hiring, perhaps a little M&A activity is in the cards?