Hipmunk Blog: Home of the savvy traveler

New: Regional Business Jet Search with Linear Air

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 10:22:00 -0800

As you know, we’re obsessed with taking the agony out of travel and providing you with the best options for your unique needs. In our dedication to make all traveling easier, we’re very excited to announce the availability of regional business jet service through our new partner, Linear Air. Now, business travelers and jetsetters alike will be able to fly from and between cities that are typically poorly served by commercial airlines. Oftentimes, flying these routes on major carriers can result in two or three connections—talk about agonizing!

With Linear, you don’t have to worry about crowds or long security lines at airports, getting frisked by TSA, or paying baggage fees. No hassles whatsoever. Just you and your colleagues or family pulling up to a private terminal, meeting the pilots and getting on your way. We’re especially proud to be the first and only U.S. travel site to include private jets in our search and mitigate what could be an agonizing experience.

Here’s how you’ll be able to find Linear Air in Hipmunk search:

Begin your search by selecting more than one passenger in coach, or a first or business class cabin.

Or select “business jet” from the class drop down menu:

Next, click “search,” and we’ll show you Linear Air flights alongside commercial flights and trains when appropriate.

You’ll also notice we jazzed up the Linear Air timebars with their own color and our first class icon in the upper right corner of the bar.

When you want to book the flight, select each leg, and we’ll send you directly to Linear Air’s website to book online, immediately - a first in the world of business jets.

Currently, you can book Linear Air on Hipmunk from nine origin airports (BOS, BED, BVY, EWR, HPN, JFK, LGA, OWD, TEB) to over 2,000 hub and regional airports east of the Mississippi and within 700 miles of the origin city. We’re pleased to offer this innovative private jet option as a new way to lower your travel agony.

Happy and safe travels!

— Jacqueline

And the "insane rope swing of the year" award goes to....

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 06:00:05 -0800

This is a Hipmunk post from Jodi Ettenberg of Legal Nomads

Via the great curators at This is Colossal, a jaw-dropping video of the a giant rope swing, looped over Corona Arch in Moab, Utah. The video was shot by Salt Lake’s Devin Graham.

If you’re interested in more, check out Devin’s equally entertaining “making of” video here.

Still not enough? This 280m freefall in Kjerag, Norway (in the Southwest) ought to do the trick. With a total freefall of 360m (1181 feet), it’s dizzying to watch let alone leap off a cliff and try!

-Jodi

The best fruit in the world

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 02:41:00 -0800

This is a Hipmunk post from Jodi Ettenberg of Legal Nomads

I may be biased - after all my Hipmunk avatar does have me holding chopsticks - but for me the best fruit there is takes the form of a purple tomato-esque treat with a green leafy stem. Mangosteens are originally thought be from the Moluccas (those same Indonesian islands as cloves, mace and nutmeg) and are now found throughout Southeast Asia.

I’m back in Thailand and one of the first things I did was eat as many of these as I could handle:

So what do they taste like?

I describe it as a cross between a lychee and an apricot. Other, like F.W. Burbidge who tried the fruit in 1880, though that it tastes “…something like that of the finest nectarine, but with a dash of strawberry and pineapple added.”

Photo by Flickr user Matsuyuki

While the mangosteen isn’t widely found in (or imported to) North America, it’s easy to locate in Southeast Asia from February through May. For those visiting the region, it’s something you shouldn’t miss!

-Jodi

The 'Munk of Love

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 09:55:00 -0800

February is the designated month of love, and we’ve been overwhelmed by the hipmunk love we see on facebook, twitter and throughout the blogosphere all year round.

Now it’s our turn to give back some love with a chance to win a unique hotel experience.

When you head to our homepage, you’ll notice the cupid ‘munk who will be your guide to sharing the love. Let him know who is in need of a little hipmunk in their lives—whether they’re heading to their sister’s wedding in San Diego, planning a multi-city business trip, or just need a little smile to start their day—the cupid ‘munk will shoot a note over to your friend via email.

If you log in or create an account before sharing some hipmunk love with a friend between today and the end of the month (Feb 29…woo hoo, leap year!), we’ll enter you for a chance to win a $500 Mr & Mrs Smith Hotel Collection Get a Room! gift card. Our friends at Mr & Mrs Smith have some chic and fantastique boutique hotels in their global portfolio including some fabulous ones on our own continent in Los Angeles, NYC, Boston, and Montreal.

On March 1, we’ll randomly select one person who shared the love and post the winner’s name to our blog.

The finer print: we encourage you to share the love with all of your friends; however, to make sure nasty spammers don’t steal all of the fun, each person will only be entered to win once. See the official rules here.

And, as you know, we aim to take the agony out of your travel. So while you’re on the site, make sure to log in or create an account, and save your airline and hotel preferences. Also sign up for our newsletter and follow us on facebook and twitter to get sneak peeks, exclusive promotions and savvy travel tips. We promise we will never spam you.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

- Jacqueline

"Game of Thrones" Valentine's Day Cards

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 07:08:59 -0800

This is a Hipmunk post from Jodi Ettenberg of Legal Nomads

This one goes out to those of you celebrating Valentine’s Day and also fans of Game of Thrones.

Buzzfeed has posted these great cards from artist Chris Bishop. For the full-sized cards, head on over to their post.

Not a Game of Thrones enthusiast? XKCD has a comic for that very special Valentine’s Day dilemma.

Internationally, Uzbekistan cancelled Valentine’s Day and Thailand imposed a 10pm curfew for all teens under 18.

-Jodi

Getting up close and personal with snowflakes

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:04:00 -0800

This is a Hipmunk post from Jodi Ettenberg of Legal Nomads

With winter in full swing (and some of the coldest temperatures on record in Eastern Europe) I wanted to highlight these stunning macro photos of snowflakes, taken by photographer Matthias Lenke:

Says photographer Matthias Lenke:

I must confess that I never cared about snowflakes too much … until I read an article about the uniqueness of each crystal. So I took my gear to the balcony and made some “field stacks“. And yes … if you are able to have a closer look, these fractal shapes are pretty fascinating. Each snowflake is a small geometric miracle.

To see the rest of Matthias’ gorgeous photos, see his full Flickr gallery. For more macro photography of snowflakes - this time in color - check out Brian Valentine’s work. (h/t to This is Colossal).

-Jodi

Vermillion Cliffs, Arizona: The National Monument You've Never Heard Of

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 06:00:05 -0800

This is a Hipmunk post from Jodi Ettenberg of Legal Nomads

Though I’ve been travelling around the world for the last 4 years, I am the first to admit that I’ve seen only one small part of what my country’s national parks and those of the United States have to offer. With such vast spaces and varied landscapes, months of discovery are needed to see them all. Take, for example, these 3000 ft tall Vermillion Cliffs in Arizona, shot by photographer Richard Barnes:

As National Geographic notes in their January 2012 magazine,

It’s hard to believe that a national monument girded by towering cliffs—their color burning through the spectrum as the day advances—could be so little known. Yet few people have heard of the place, apart from one or two of its famous features. One reason is that Vermilion Cliffs National Monument is upstaged by its neighbors, which include some of the most famous national parks and monuments in the United States: Grand Canyon, Zion, Bryce Canyon, and more.

Adding it to the bucket list, stat!

For those in the region, note that there are few marked trails and rangers found in the bigger National Parks, so it’s quite an undertaking to visit, and one where preemptive planning is necessary. Additional info, maps and camping sites for the adventure-seekers among you Hipmunks can be found on the Arizona Bureau of Land Management’s site.

-Jodi

A night in Calgary (the airport)

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 09:01:00 -0800

Did you know that it’s possible to visit Calgary in the dead of winter without changing from a California wardrobe? Recently, Joe, our biz dev guy, and I did just that when we visited WestJet headquarters (did you know they offer direct flights from Los Angeles?).

Our 18-hour whirlwind started with a 30-yard dash through 20-degree weather out of the terminal to the Delta Calgary Airport hotel across the street. We dropped out bags and grabbed a little dinner. We had some great B.C. sockeye salmon with artfully arranged vegetables, risotto with tarragon, and a Mission Hill merlot (yeah, they make wine in Canada, too).

The next morning, we went back across the street for a true slice of Canada - some Tim Horton’s coffee and the requisite box of Timbits to bring home before jumping a cab to WestJet headquarters on the other side of the runway.

The folks at WestJet had expansive views of planes taxiing (Joe loves planes) on one side and the Calgary skyline on the other. We liked their lobby so much, we had to take a picture. Check out my phone’s new panorama camera mode.

We had a great meeting and made our flight home with the promise to return in proper winter clothes for some skiing.

- Julie

Map of the day: "the places I haven't been"

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 06:00:00 -0800

This is a Hipmunk post from Jodi Ettenberg of Legal Nomads

I came across Evan Drolet Cook’s “Places I Haven’t Been” map this week and wanted to share it here.

So much of our online world is showing what we’ve done that we sometimes lose sight of the other side of the coin, the things we still want to see and do. This tongue-in-cheek map, is the perfect visual companion to those thoughts.

When I first saw the map, I thought of the bulletin board I put together before I left on my round-the-world trip, pinning all the places I’d already seen prior to the longer-term travels. Perhaps I ought to have pinned the places I wanted to go, or the sites that enticed me instead - it would have been a far more inspiring map.

Evan’s got a whole slew of other fun, quirky projects on his portfolio site.

h/t to Lauren for the initial find.

Do any of you have maps that inspire you? Please leave URLs or photos in the comments!

-Jodi

Desert rivers that look like trees

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 06:00:00 -0800

This is a Hipmunk post from Jodi Ettenberg of Legal Nomads

Some of the most evocative travel photography is the kind that makes you see something normal in a totally different light. Take the photo below, a bird’s eye view of Baja California desert in Mexico, taken by Adriana Franco:

Hard to believe that this is a desert image and not a delicate hand-painted canvas of furrowed branches and trees. We all know that nature is beautiful, but sometimes it’s a surprise to see it shifted into an unexpected form.

For a few more shots of the desert from above, see Adriana’s gallery on National Geographic.

-Jodi

Behold the blue marble we call Earth

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 04:48:00 -0800

This is a Hipmunk post from Jodi Ettenberg of Legal Nomads

In what has been lauded as one of the more incredible photos of our planet ever released, NASA has issued a staggeringly high-definition photo of Earth from space. The photo was taken by the new Suomi NPP satellite, launched in late October of 2011. Here’s a smaller version:

Pretty incredible, right?

This photo is a composite image of several swaths of the Earth’s surface, all from January 4, 2012. Here’s the giant 8000x8000 version - gorgeous.

For a comparison of how much imaging technology has improved over the years, here’s the 1972 version of the same photo:

Quite a difference. Looking forward to seeing what other images come out of the satellite’s rotation.

-Jodi

England & Scotland in Photos

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 07:05:00 -0800

This is a Hipmunk post from Jodi Ettenberg of Legal Nomads

After months of travel through Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, I spent the last few months in England with my brother and his friends. It was great to relax and enjoy the holidays with family, but it also gave a perspective of the country that I didn’t have before. There’s something offputting about returning to a comfortable place after being abroad, but it is also wonderful to see it in a different light.

Here are some photos from my winter months in the UK.

English countryside by train:

Gloucester, shot through a pinhole:

Zizzi’s restaurant in black & white:

Burger of Champions:

London graffiti:

London Eye & the Thames at night:

Tilt-shift Cheltenham:

Sunset over the Cotswolds:

Walking through Lanercost Priory:

View of Edinburgh from Arthur’s Seat:

Downtown Edinburgh, as seen from the castle:

Sheep on the drive back to England:

And of course, Hadrian’s wall:

Surreal underwater photos by biologist Alexander Semenov

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 02:37:27 -0800

This is a Hipmunk post from Jodi Ettenberg of Legal Nomads

I stumbled on this bright, ethereal photos from under the sea and had to share them here. Alexander Semenov is a biologist who now does a gorgeous job of photographing what he spent so long studying.

Exhibit A:

Semenov notes that he got into underwater photography by accident:

When I first began to experiment with sea life photography I tried shooting small invertebrates for fun with my own old camera and without any professional lights or lenses. I collected the invertebrates under water and then I’ve shot them in the lab. After two or three months of failure after failure I ended up with a few good pictures, which I’ve showed to the crew. It has inspired us to buy a semi-professional camera complete with underwater housing and strobes. Thus I’ve spent the following field season trying to shoot the same creatures, but this time in their environment. It was much more difficult, and I spent another two months without any significant results. But when you’re working at something every day, you inevitably get a lot of experience. Eventually I began to get interesting photos — one or two from each dive. Now after four years of practice I get a few good shots almost every time I dive but I still have a lot of things that need to be mastered in underwater photography.

You can check out more of his photos on Flickr, or this photoessay of jellyfish on This is Colossal. Don’t miss his Northern Lights photoset on his website either - it rivals the above deep sea photos in brightness and beauty.

-Jodi

The Making of Hotel Search on Mobile

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 12:54:00 -0800

It began with a demo.

Our mobile hotel search app was weeks away from shipping. The UI was tight, performance was shaping up and the punchlist was shrinking.

But there was a problem. Jacqueline, our press whisperer, did a hotel search in the new app. She couldn’t figure out which, from the dozens of hotels depicted on the map, was the one she actually wanted - and didn’t know where to start.

While seeing all those options from the comfort of a desktop’s huge screen wasn’t bad, now the results were unusable. We debated changes but my head wasn’t really in it. My ears were ringing.

For all our slick UI and data visualization, we were nowhere in terms of making it easy and fast to find a great hotel from your phone.

We’d failed.

Alongside this, I’d been devouring Edward Tufte’s Envisioning Information. The book is packed with styles and strategies for displaying data, along with analysis and cautionary tales. On the train one morning, I turned a page then violently emptied the contents of my forehead onto the seat in front of me.

For on that page, Tufte had helpfully supplied the solution to our problem.

This diagram combines two intricate layers of information: component illustrations and their identifying numbers. One is rendered in grayscale, the other red. Despite the complexity, the image comes apart quickly and cleanly. With this example in hand, redesigning the dots’ behavior and appearance went quickly.

We could fill the entire map with hotels, as we already were, but now we’d only color rooms whose stats made them worth recommending. The rest would appear grayer and smaller – easily ignored, but still illustrating the contours of an area’s hotels. When the user moves or zooms the map, we do all the math again, coloring only the best options in the new region.

The effect draws your eye to investigate the creme-de-la-creme. From there, UI mechanics take over to examine hotels without leaving the map. Before you know it, you’re making choices.

It was also important to make scanning hotel lists easier on the eye. Hotels are broken into three price buckets: cheap (green), average (blue) and pricey (red). Room prices were set in the color of their bucket. Because each price was different, interpreting bucket meant actually reading the colored text, which takes a little time. By setting the price in a simple badge that’s always the same size and position, the user only needs to glance to know a hotel’s bucket. A small detail, sure, but it makes a big difference with momentum scrolling.

The resulting experience was so quick and satisfying, we wanted it on the site, too. So go try out the new Hipmunk Hotel search for Android, iOS, and now, the web.

— Danilo

Incredible footage: a peregrine falcon hunting in a murmuration of starlings

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 03:43:00 -0800

This is a Hipmunk post from Jodi Ettenberg of Legal Nomads

Not too long ago, I posted about a murmuration of starlings in flight over Istanbul. The sight of it stopped me in my tracks nightly as clouds of birds circled their way around the city.

Here’s another version of the remarkable phenomenon over Rome, with a peregrine falcon hunting for its dinner:

A friend sent me this footage today, shot by John Downer Productions and BBC as part of their EarthFlight series. What blew me away was how close the camera got to these birds. According to the Earthflight website:

To create its bird’s-eye view of the world Earthflight uses a host of extraordinary filming techniques including filming “imprinted” flocks from microlites, wild flocks filmed from model gliders and silent drones, full-sized helicopter with stabilised mounts and cameras on the backs of trained birds. Slow-motion techniques also reveal extraordinary detail such as swallows plucking feathers from the air.

Looking forward to the rest of these videos in the series. Beautiful stuff.

-Jodi

Tahiti + surfing + a rainbow = a perfect photo

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 08:28:00 -0800

This is a Hipmunk post from Jodi Ettenberg of Legal Nomads

Over 13,000 votes were cast for Surfer Mag’s 2011 Photo of the Year contest, and the winning picture is a stunning capture, shot in Tahiti by Zak Noyle:

In an interview with the photographer, Surfer mag asks how the photo came about. Noyle notes:

It was an amazing afternoon with just my friends out in the water. There were five guys in the water with pristine conditions. It wasn’t huge, but I saw that rainbow forming. I was shooting fisheye, and I was quite close in, so I kind of kicked back toward the channel and framed it up like that. It was just a quick moment, it only lasted for two waves, and it just happened to be a setup.

You can head on over to the interview to read more about Noyle. While you do that, I’m just going to sit here and stare at the photo above - it’s just that beautiful. (Thanks to Alex Ogle for bringing it to my attention.)

-Jodi

A Glance at 2011, and Look to 2012

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 10:26:26 -0800

2011 was Hipmunk’s first full year in existence. And we couldn’t have asked for better—not only did millions of new users try us for the first time, but we were able to remove even more agony from their travel searching. On our one year anniversary in August, we calculated that we had saved you over 150,000 hours of agony within our first year, and we’re pretty close to doubling that already!

In taking a quick look back, here are some of our highlights:

Hotel Search. Building on our insanely popular flight search, we rolled out an innovative new way of searching for hotels this year. With features like our unique heatmaps, you can easily find the best hotels in the best parts of town.
Mobile Apps. We listened to all of you who asked for an iPhone version of our flight search, and built a free app just for you. Then we listened again when all our Android fans demanded a version of their own—now we have one of those, too. Thank you to the hundreds of thousands of people who’ve downloaded each of our apps!
Calendar Integration. As we’ve started traveling more for business, we realized how frustrating it was to find flights that fit in our schedule, and hotels near where we had meetings. We solved both problems by letting you integrate your calendar into your Hipmunk searches.

There have been dozens of other cool partnerships and features that we’ve rolled out over the past year, and we humbly look back on everything we’ve accomplished. Thank you so much to all of you—our loyal users—who have made suggestions, sent feedback, and tweeted your love and support!

We’re excited to bring you even more great tools in 2012. Before you know it, your travel searching will be totally agony-free!

— Adam

What happens to your books when you go to bed?

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 07:55:21 -0800

This is a Hipmunk post from Jodi Ettenberg of Legal Nomads

In a departure from the usual travel fare, I wanted to share this whimsical video animating what happens to a bookstore at night, if you use your imagination. For booklovers, camera lovers and those who enjoy a short film:

Some background, from creator Sean Ohlenkamp:

After organizing our bookshelf almost a year ago, my wife and I decided to take it to the next level. We spent many sleepless nights moving, stacking, and animating books at Type bookstore in Toronto.

It definitely paid off! Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Back to usually-scheduled programming on Friday.

-Jodi

New: Hotel Search on Mobile!

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 09:54:26 -0800

You’ve been asking, and so we’re pleased to announce that hotel search and booking is now available for free through our iOS and Android mobile apps. Until now, just flight search was available on the go, but with this major update, we’re bringing our innovative, visual hotel search to hundreds of millions of mobile devices, including yours! Check out these great reviews from TechCrunch, VentureBeat, San Francisco Chronicle and CNET!

Hot on the heels of our successful 2011 launches of the iOS and Android apps, our mobile developers, Danilo Campos and Ryan Oldenburg, have been cranking away on this since summer. They’ve brought the same unique, map-based hotel experience you know and love from our website to our apps. Now, you have Hipmunk’s inventory of over 300,000 global hotels at your fingertips.

Here’s a quick walkthrough of what you’ll see (on iPhone):

First off, we noticed that most of our users who were searching for hotels from mobile browsers were searching for a hotel for that night. So we automatically search from your current location, enabled by GPS, with ability to enter a new destination:

We use “Ecstasy,” a combination of reviews, prices and amenities to figure out your best options. The hotels we think you’ll like show up as colorful dots. Red ones are pricey, green ones are cheap and blue ones are average.

But picking a hotel is unique to an individual, which is why we let you filter by price or chain, and overlay heatmaps:

Heatmaps let you see which parts of a city are most active for different interests, including food, nightlight, shopping, and tourist attractions:

So let’s grab a hotel. Click on the colored dot for quick hotel details:

Tap again to see more details on that hotel:

We also let you see TripAdvisor reviews if you’re interested:

And when you’re ready to book, we give you options. You can book through the supplier, email the link to a family member, colleague or friend, or receive the finish code so you can finish the booking from a desktop:

And here’s what you’ll see on iPad:

And on Android:

And it’s that simple! The Hipmunk Flight and Hotel Search App is available for free from the App Store here and Android Market here.

Update your app or download it, test it out, and let us know what you think!

— Adam

Not your everyday travel photo: dogs on motorbikes

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 03:01:00 -0800

This is a Hipmunk post from Jodi Ettenberg of Legal Nomads

A weekly hashtag called FriFotos has emerged on Twitter, started by Jonathan Epstein as a way to share themed photos to a group of curious travelers. I don’t always participate, but this week’s theme is dogs, and I wanted to share my not-so-everyday photos of dogs on the road. Literally:

While I was trying to get a photo of the first dog, he turned to look at me with pure disdain, as if to say “What? You find this interesting? Please.” And it’s true: the amount of things and animals and people that Thais can fit on one tiny motorbike is staggering.

Oh and by the way? They drive cars too:

Have any travelling dog photos of your own? Share them in the comments - photos are enabled.

-Jodi