Featured by Apple Plan Your Dream Vacation

Hipmunk made travel search friendly. Flights were bars on a visual timeline you could sort by “Agony” (a blend of price, duration, and stops), and a goggled chipmunk walked you through the whole trip. I led the iOS team from 2017 to 2019, after SAP Concur acquired the company, eventually as the mobile team’s development manager. The app served about 80,000 sessions a month, and its flight search held an NPS around 70.

Hipmunk's flight results on iPad: each flight drawn as a bar on a visual timeline

The signature feature: flights on a timeline, so the trade-offs are visible at a glance.

My biggest hands-on build was Book on Hipmunk, native hotel booking end to end: room selection, payments, cancellation policies, guest info, and the confirmation flow. Before each release I ran internal playtests, putting experiment-enabled builds on real devices in front of coworkers to shake out the flow.

By 2019 the hotels experience was moving to a hybrid architecture: web-rendered screens inside the native app, driven by a message API, so product changes could ship without waiting on App Store review.

Two minutes of hotel search in the app: query, filters, hotel details, and the booking handoff.

I also owned how the team shipped. I wrote the iOS playbook that set our architecture and testing conventions, automated the release pipeline with Fastlane, moved CI to Bitrise, and ran hiring and the intern program for the four-person mobile team.

The Hipmunk home screen with the mascot, Discover destinations, and fare alerts

The app in 2019: search, Discover, fare alerts, and the chipmunk in charge.

In June 2019 Apple featured the app in its “Plan Your Dream Vacation” App Store story, alongside Kayak and Hotels.com. That month the App Store listing reached over a million devices and installs doubled.

SAP Concur wound Hipmunk down in January 2020. The chipmunk is still missed.

In the press

I was always a fan of how Hipmunk changed the industry. It was a timesaver and a confidence-booster. You didn't have to double-check their work.
Scott Keyes, founder of Scott's Cheap Flights, in The Washington Post
This level of search-detail and quality UX interface is a habit-forming convenience for passengers that helps simplify the sometimes taxing experience of flight shopping. We can expect that it will soon be a core expectation for travel shopping.
Marisa Garcia, PhocusWire, 2018

Coverage

Writing

Two posts from this work: