Hipmunk is the only site I actually enjoy using to book my travel, and a big part of that is due to user experience, which is clearly a big priority for the company’s founders. I dread going to most travel sites because the entire user experience is extremely cluttered and not user friendly. At Hipmunk, I can sort based on “agony” as opposed to “lowest price” which makes it a lot easier to see your best options on their user friendly interface when booking your travels. I’m so happy to see that this startup has gotten it right. I love the clean sleek design, easiness to use to find the best options and you completely fall in love with the cute little chipmunk.
I may be also a little biased because of a recent story that happened. I have been following @KeyserSosa the chief scientist and @thehipmunk and noticed that they were giving away tshirts to a twitter user because they reported a bug, so I jumped right into the conversation and demanded one too, although I really had no apparent reason to get one. I honestly didn’t expect a response, however few hours later I got this response:
A couple of weeks later, I did receive my tshirt and two cute little luggage tags:
This is a great way to create brand loyalty. Not only, am I going to continue to use hipmunk to show my support, I am actually help spread it around. When a few of my colleagues saw the goodies I received, they immediately started asking questions about the company and of course they will be checking it out too. This is a great story of how companies can get your users to bring new customers for them by driving word of mouth advertising. The genesis of all of this is the product. If users love it enough they will want their friends and family to use it as well and go out of their way to recommend it…
