Interview: Hipmunk CEO on Online Travel’s Race to the Middle

Adam Goldstein, co-founder and CEO of four-year-old metasearch site Hipmunk, sees competitors rushing to be more like online travel agencies, and online travel agencies starting to offer metasearch results on their own search results pages. In the context of what Goldstein calls this "race to the middle," the most successful companies will be those that "can just move the fastest," Goldstein says. "You know, who can build a booking experience and a metasearch experience, and have it work well on all devices for all verticals, in all countries, and so on." Goldstein believes that nimble companies such as his own Hipmunk as well as HotelTonight and Gogobot, have some advantages over large public companies that need to worry about cannibalizing existing lines of business. "If you look at the companies that have lost market share in online travel in the U.S., I think that's exactly the trap that they fell into," Goldstein says. "Successful companies are the ones that have invested