[pmchiu]

Congrats to the folks at Hipmunk. I've always really liked the simplicity of this idea for travel search.

I do wonder, however, how long they'll be able to continue to link directly to the airlines. I'm assuming (and this may be an overly broad generalization) that as they build out features for users this will naturally force them to create interstitial's between the carrier's website and their own. I seem to recall that Kayak was very similar in terms of its relationship with carriers when they initially started. But as they built out more functionality they created more for the user to do on their site distracting them away from the carrier site.

So although TechCrunch thinks it interesting that American isn't cutting out Hipmunk is this really going to be true in the long run?

[kin]

I think so, for financial reasons. AA cut themselves out to cut costs. Orbitz and other similar services were (from what I heard) overcharging AA for referral costs. Naturally, I think Hipmunk and AA simply have a deal that won't really hurt AA.