Traveling with the iPhone | Hipmunk
There are a ton of flight search apps available for the iPhone (including the Kayak app I featured before) but the new Hipmunk is notable for its simplicity and attractive interface. There’s no extraneous stuff here — just impressively quick flight search and comparisons.
Select your point of departure, destination, and preferred travel dates and Hipmunk spits out your available options to a slick timeline-oriented UI - a visual matrix organized by departure time, price and carrier* (with additional filters like Length and, amusingly, the default Agony).
If you want to buy a fare, the app will link directly to a service like Orbitz via Mobile Safari or email you the link if you prefer to handle later on your home computer.
Hipmunk is so clean and simple, it makes painfully evident how cluttered and overwrought — and perhaps irrelevant — web-based travel search sites have become.
Download the Hipmunk iPhone app on iTunes (Free)
For more apps in my Traveling with the iPhone series, click here.
* If there’s any downside to Hipmunk it’s that a few carriers like American Airlines and Southwest are not searchable. This, however, isn’t unique to Hipmunk. AA and Southwest don’t make their flights available to any third-party search.
