February 3, 2011
The hippest flight search service can now reduce your agony while on the go
Hipmunk, a startup with a new innovative way to search for flights, announced this week that it has launched its very first mobile application, for iPhone and other iOS devices.“After three months of prototyping, design, development, iteration and testing, we’re proud to announce Hipmunk for iPhone,” wrote iOS developer Danilo Campos in a blog post. “It comfortably scales your favorite flight search visualization to a 3.5 inch screen. Now you can easily pick and book your flights anywhere.”
As Campos says, Hipmunk for iPhone does a really good job of translating the simplicity and straightforwardness of the website to mobile. Just like on the site, mobile users enter in the airports of arrival and departure, travel dates, fare type (coach, business or first) and number of people traveling. Conveniently, the app saves recent searches.
Booking a flight from the app is a piece of cake. You can either finish booking in the mobile Web browser, email the booking link to yourself or to a friend, or finish on a nearby desktop computer by using a secret code word displayed in the app.
Here are some screenshots:
If you’re intrigued by the mobile app, check out our post from a couple weeks ago, when Hipmunk confirmed a $4.2 million round of funding from Ignition Partners and others. In that post, I walk through the basics of the site and provide a couple screenshots (that’s really all you need to see, the site is so simple.).
Hipmunk has a considerable chance of being a viral success, in my opinion, not only due of its ease of use, but because the company has character. The name is catchy, the Hipmunk mascot is a cute chipmunk with its arms spread out like airplane wings, and the entire mission of the service is to reduce the agony of flying. What more could a frequent flyer ask for?
Even reading about the launch of the iPhone app feels more like fun than a chore.
“Like any good iPhone app, Hipmunk does its best to be fun,” said Campos.
And fun is what Hipmunk is. We’ll be following them closely.
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