Hipmunk < Expedia, again

This time on a NY-Cincinnati roundtrip. Hipmunk could find the individual flights but could not put them together. In contrast, Expedia got it right the first time.

See here and here for background. If anybody reading this knows David Pogue, please let him know about this. A flashy interface is fine, but ultimately what I’m looking for is a flight at the right place and the right time.

6 thoughts on “Hipmunk < Expedia, again

  1. I think you're wrong on this one.

    I find hipmunk VERY useful in finding flights. I find expedia's display to be a lot less useful.

    So, we have two tools, each of which — in my view — has major flaws. To the extent that hipmunk misses some airlines or can't put together flights, it fails.

    But to the extent that Expedia doesn not make it possible (or easy) for me to compare flights, times, durations and costs, it fails, too.

    I get that you are more forgiving of expedia's flaws than hipmunk's flaws. But it is more complicated than that.

  2. Ceolaf:

    It's not about being more forgiving. It's that I had some pretty sharp constraints–in particular, there was exactly one nonstop return flight that worked for me–and Hipmunk actually found the flight but couldn't pair it up with anything useful. I could imagine that Hipmunk could be helpful in a more open-ended travel plan. But to say there are no flights when there actually are flights available–that's a deal-breaker to me.

  3. I've always found that http://www.skyscanner.net/ works really well (although I'm European so I have no idea of intra-USA flights). It searches airlines direct and a number of other sites including expedia. It also allows more general searches such as in month of July, UK to Spain.

  4. I agree with Ceolaf here. None of the search engines are perfect and it pays to check a couple of sites before buying. I've had cases where Hipmunk found the better deal and cases where Kayak did better. Sometimes going direct to the airline website is best if you know which airline you want. Generally, I find Hipmunk easiest to use, though Kayak is probably better for more open-ended searches (when destination or date aren't fixed). Kayak will automatically launch concurrent expedia/priceline searches if you are keen on either of them.

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