Unrelated but I have to point it out since it happens constantly...
If you're a start-up and you're directing people to your blog, please, please, please make an obvious and easy link from the blog to your startup's homepage. Don't hide it in the sidebar, don't make the 'home' link on the blog go to the blog's homepage, don't waste the damn traffic.
Make it brainless for me to get from your blog to your startup's homepage.
Quick advice from your friendly neighborhood SEO: putting your blog on a domain that is different from your website is an acceptable business decision if Google rankings for your website do not matter.
Usually they set up a wordpress install for the blog and out-of-the-box the home button links to the blog itself. Changing it usually takes a little bit of tinkering and folks just never get around to it.
My ver 0 of the blog had a nearly identical top banner to the mintlife blog, but the ctr was atrocious.
I've been experimenting with placements and sizes since day 1. The buttons on the footer of each post are doing pretty well so far (but they're still a new edition).
date update: Turns out the referrals to hipmunk from the blog were practically tied for second highest ever, so perhaps we should just keep drawing attention to our funnel methods ;) Realizing you totally missed the next 2 links beside home (flights / hotels) was a good prompt to update that section. Thanks for that.
I looked to the Hipmunk logo, and then I looked to the 'home' link... then I found it in the sidebar. Its nitpick I'll admit but it seems odd to see so many startups use their blog to direct users to their site and then not optimize a way to get them in.
Interesting. That's what I modeled it off of (and have been consulting Mint folks about it). The previous (posterous) blog had a banner at the top that was identical to mint's, but the ctr was abysmal. I've been moving around the giant button on the right sidebar to test placements and recently added the 'search for flights' and 'search for hotels' in the footer of each post that have been doing quite well lately.
Interesting. I used the exact top header from the mint blog on our posterous blog for the last 10mos or so with little CTR success, even as I tweaked fonts/color/size, etc.
To the immediate right of "home," the links "flights" and "hotels" link to their respective searches, but thanks for the anecdotal evidence. I'll give it a tweak right now.
Totally agreed. I also lost a little respect for Hipmunk when I found out they are basically an exact copy of ITA's app: http://matrix.itasoftware.com/search.htm.
ITA's app doesn't seem nearly as useful to me for a few reasons:
1) The form at the beginning is much more confusing. Creating a search with Hipmunk is much less complicated.
2) Flights are ordered by price, whereas Hipmunk orders them by "agony", which in my experience, seems to be pretty accurate.
3) Doesn't default to time bar mode, like Hipmunk does.
I wouldn't at all fault you guys for taking advantage of the coverage. I'm just wondering why the HN crowd decided to give free advertising to a small incremental update.
This does give a compelling reason to join YC, though: plenty of cheerleading around YC startups.
I got one for a flight to Hong Kong. iPad ran constantly for >16 hours, and it was also handy for topping off an iPhone when batteries ran low. Well worth the cash if you travel for extended periods.
I think giving consumers the ability to view flight information other than price and schedule will encourage airlines to provide better services and features.
I'd love to quickly be able to compare the costs of checking luggage, cancellation insurance costs, etc.
Wishful thinking but highly unlikely. The airline industry has shown to be very, very price sensitive and customers, although they complain about service, really are just looking for the cheapest flight.
I've always thought the downfall of the airline industry is our (consumers') own fault; we search by price and only seem to deviate from price as our main criteria on occasion in the name of loyalty plans.
There's a major difference between the behavior of leisure and business travelers. Leisure travelers have (historically) been price-sensitive in the extreme. Business travelers have been way more schedule- and airline-sensitive. This is why you see so many perks thrown at business travelers (free upgrades, etc.)—it's an attempt by the airlines to win the business of their most profitable clients.
As to whether airlines will be inspired to install more wi-fi, consider this: all the major US airlines that don't already have wi-fi on their entire fleet have announced plans to install it on a lot more of their fleet this year. They're hoping people—especially business travelers—will make their purchasing decisions on the basis of wi-fi.
Personally, I think I might care more about service when choosing a flight if I had some idea what the service would be like before hand. Right now I need to manually go look up reviews for the airline. It's also made worse because some airlines are really multiple different airline's put in one (usually via acquisition).
This is fantastic news! If I am on another unproductive cross-country flight watching mindless iTunes rental movies on my iPad instead of working (or reading HN) I'm going to go crazy.
Is Hipmunk's information on flights to Australia actually decent? I took a look at it a while back for Canada-Europe flights and the results were less than inspiring.
> Is Hipmunk's information on flights to Australia actually decent? I took a look at it a while back for Canada-Europe flights and the results were less than inspiring.
I always found Hipmunk to be fairly average to-and-from Australia. In fact, as an example: to fly from Perth to Shanghai, the cheapest/least agonising flight is $1477.
Direct via Singapore Airlines' website, with the same amount of agony (just the one transfer at Changi (Singapore)) is $1126, flying with the one airline the whole time (even better!). There's also the Cathay Pacific option at $1136 odd.
Hipmunk is probably darned good in the US, by all accounts, but internationally it's a bit weak.
In cars maybe, but in flight? At 4.5km above the towers? Not a chance.
There are two main techs for on-board WiFi:
* Air-to-ground radiotelephony (what AirFone[0] used to use), which works like cell phones except for the sky, and with not cell towers and on a different frequency band. So not really like cell towers. This is the technology of Aircell's Gogo (which seems to be Hipmunk's partner on there) and LiveTV's. Advantage is that it's pretty cheap (~100k/plane of equipment), but it will only work over land (as it's based on ground antennas)
* Satellites, this is Row44's technology (via HughesNet), the tech is far more expensive to setup in planes but more flexible and works across oceans. As far as I know, Row44 is only being implemented by SouthWest and Norwegian Air Shuttle. Alaska Airlines tried it (and the trial was successful), but decided to go Aircell GoGo for cost reasons.
I dispute your characterization of air-to-ground telephony as "not really like cell towers". Aircel (the guys behind Gogo Inflight) themselves characterize it as such on their own website[0]. I was, however, unaware of the satellite tech.
I use Virgin Atlantic for all transatlantic flights, and they do offer internet access, just not WiFi. The screens in the backs of seats can be used to read a very limited number of news stories, and you can also send (and possibly receive, can't remember) emails. I rarely bother to use it, the interface is so bad, so I might be forgetting some features.
So, communicating with the internet isn't the problem, they just don't offer a network for customers to join with their own devices (possibly for cost purposes, possibly they have bandwidth worries or possibly they just haven't got round to it yet.)
We're growing our faredata outside of the US every day, but we started with the market we know best to make all of our carrier relationships. Keep checking back! In the meantime, if hipmunk doesn't provide you an awesome set of search results to/from Oz, do try http://adioso.com
slightly off topic but I love the Hipmunk date control. You can type in your date in any format and it'll parse it. No need to make tons of click to navigate through a calendar control.
If you're a start-up and you're directing people to your blog, please, please, please make an obvious and easy link from the blog to your startup's homepage. Don't hide it in the sidebar, don't make the 'home' link on the blog go to the blog's homepage, don't waste the damn traffic.
Make it brainless for me to get from your blog to your startup's homepage.