One Site to Search and Sort All Flights: You Must Try Hipmunk

Name:

Quick Pitch: Hipmunk helps you find the right flight. It hides the bad flights and sorts the good ones.

Genius Idea: What do you hate most about air travel? Is it the costs? The brutal flight durations and multiple layovers? Having to leave your house at the crack of dawn or arriving at your destination in the dead of night?

Whatever you hate most, Hipmunk will help you filter out so you can quickly see, select and purchase the best flights.

It’s refreshing to find a web app that solves a legitimate, common consumer problem. We see a lot of social communication tools focused on web geeks and early adopters, but not as many that are focused on solving the everyday problems that the average person experiences.

Hipmunk effectively solves the problem of sorting through half a dozen slow and painful discount travel user interfaces to find the one flight you need. According to the company, “Hipmunk makes intelligent decisions about which flights to show you. For example, if there’s a cheap, non-stop flight on your favorite airline, Hipmunk will hide more expensive one-stop options on other airlines.”

Once you tell Hipmunk when and where you’d like to go and on which airline, if any, you prefer to fly, the app sorts out available flights and filters them by multiple factors. You can see flights organized by price, number of stops, total duration, and departure and arrival times. Or, you can click the “agony” tab to see the creme-de-la-creme of flights — the ones that score best on all factors.

The interface is quick, simple and intuitive. The app replaced an hour’s worth of back-and-forth navigation and research within a few clicks; we were able to find a great flight that met our needs and purchase it through a partner travel site (currently, just Orbitz).

You can also run multiple searches using tabs that run inside the browser window. If you have a frequent flyer number, you can use that during the checkout process. If you run into trouble, you can IM live with a Hipmunk rep from within the app.

It’s a brilliant, well-executed application with baked-in revenue potential.

That being said, there are a few bugs (we asked for flights to Washington, DC, and were sent instead to New York’s JFK, for example) that still need to be hammered out. And we’d like the app to integrate with more travel sites, too. Still, for a site that just launched two days ago, we’re impressed; we’re sure the app’s creators will be shellacking the site with appropriate layers of polish in the days and weeks to come.

And with regard to the apps’ creators, the site’s co-founders are Steve Huffman, who co-founded Reddit, and and Adam Goldstein, who wrote AppleScript: The Missing Manual at the tender age of 16. Although the site is drastically different and with a drastically different intended audience from Reddit, we must acknowledge the star power of this San Francisco-based team.

We highly recommend you give Hipmunk a shot next time you’re searching for flights; it’s a time-saver for consumers and an interesting app to watch for startups and investors.

Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

More About: flight, hipmunk, Search, startup, travel

For more Tech coverage:

• Follow Mashable Tech on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Tech channel
• Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad