Hipmunk Flights

As someone who regularly travels between continents as a long term traveller, I spend a decent amount of money on international flights and thus am always searching for the best deals online. With this in mind, I set out to review HipMunk.

To review the website, I searched for return flights in March from London to Cairo. The website offers “Price Drop Alerts” which is especially useful for anyone looking for flights in the distant future who has time to wait to see how prices fluctuate. A huge range of flights was returned for London to Cairo on my selected dates, and a useful sliding bar let me choose what time I wanted to leave London, and what time I wanted to arrive in Cairo. A column let me see pictorially which flights offered amenities such as food, WiFi, a charger etc, which I found easy to interpret and useful. Where there was a change of flights, you could see on the sliding bar how long you would be and where. I found this layout of information easy to digest. Hipmunk lets you sort the flights by price, duration, take off (early to late), landing (early to late or late to early), take off (early to late or late to early). It also has its own algorithm which lest you search by “agony” which it advertises as a blend of “price, durations, stops and dependability”. The “agony search” recommended the flight which was actually the cheapest: this is not like a hotel search where the “recommended” hotel happens to always be one of the most expensive ones!

When trying to book the flight, an offer was made to join the “special deals newsletter”. I like that this was optional, and not forced upon me. When I clicked through to the flight, it took me to travel2be to make the payment, and the flight had jumped from $421 to $456 which I found frustrating.

Hipmunk is a decent flight search engine: it is easy to navigate, offers a decent range of flights and looks trustworthy. I´m not sure as of yet whether it offers more than other established competitors such as Google Flights or Skyscanner: however, given how easy the site is to use it is a worthwhile stop when searching for a cheap flight.

David Jones

I am a professional travel writer and travel enthusiast who traveled the world twice, so I am sharing my firsthand knowledge about everything related to travel and spending time abroad.