I could not disagree more vehemently.

1. Default sorting by agony has been wonderful for me. I'm willing to pay a moderate amount more for a flight that doesn't suck - whereas most travel sites would rather assume I'm a complete scrooge that wants to squeeze every last dollar off the price, redeyes and multi-airline connections be damned!

Hipmunk lets me look at pricing and "quality of experience" at a glance. The nifty bars also let me make my own decision about the "agony" of the flight instead of simply trusting Hipmunk's own metric.

2. IMHO, nonsense. I've never been once confused by the "from $XXX" term on Hipmunk - it means that the price can vary depending on what I select for the other leg. Secondly, the problem with Kayak's approach is that I have to sift through endless pages of the same departing flight, but with varying returning flights - or vice versa. That's not empowering, that's tedium. If I could count the times on Kayak where I've had to compare prices, then compare if the two have the same departing flight... or the same returning flight... argh.

3. I don't even know how to respond to this one. Everyone I've shown Hipmunk to, ever, has been ecstatic about being able to pick the legs separately. Methinks the blog author falls into an edge case and is not representative of the general population. Hell, I think this is one of those things that will make Hipmunk win.

4. So why is the precise departure or arrival important when deciding which flight you want to book? Does 9:05am vs. 9:20am really make a salient difference? From what I can tell, the whole point of Hipmunk is that it gives you a more powerful overarching view of your choices, instead of getting you stuck in the details. Getting the precise time is as easy as clicking on a choice - but when I'm making a decision on the quality of a flight I sure as heck don't need to know my times down to the minute.

5. I'll agree on this part. Being able to specify departure/arrival time ranges is pretty powerful.

6. Could not disagree more. One thing that's I've liked about Hipmunk is the ability to run multiple searches in parallel. Kayak on the other hand forces me to open a new tab, fill in everything all over again to do the same. The fact that Kayak will time-out your (very, very bodacious) search results after some time makes this doubly annoying. Kayak dumps you a metric ton of data and expects you to comb through it in how long?

7. Agreed.

Bottom line: I think the author is disconnected from what consumers want out of flight searches. Or rather, what a large segment of consumers want, who are under-served by the current players in the market - that is to say, the people who are willing to pay some premium for a flight experience that isn't painful, and want a tool that will allow them to make this decision easily.

Kayak was a godsend when it first came out - it was so, so far ahead of what we dared call online flight booking. But, it's starting to show its age - lately I don't even want to go to Kayak, the search results page is like nails on chalkboard.

Here's a suggestion to Kayak that (IMHO) would massively improve the UX: group flight pairs by departing flight. Give me each departing flight, then for each departing flight give me the available returning flights and the corresponding package prices. That would make the results so much easier to parse. As it is I get 10 different results that are all actually the same departing flight paired with every possible returning flight under the sun. It's annoying.