That's a bit unfair to judge a recently graduated startup on its current face value. I am sure they have more under the hood a-brewin'. They already solved my pain indirectly for group travel - I was screen sharing with my friends and the layout helped us figure out a time much faster! I do hope there could be some sort of group travel exploration feature down the road a la chat or group search :-)

"Hipmunk" is a cool pun - it's a hip c'hipmunk' (or could be Hip Monk :-p) Either way, it's much more personified with the mascot (like the Reddit alien) than vowel dropping startups.

It may not the best URL available for what they currently do. I just did a 5-minute IDS check and pickfly.com (WAY better IMHO) is available, for example.

But see, then they would get "stuck" to the market they're starting in, would lose having a Google-unique name and would probably even have to fight their way up to the first result in travel's very-cutthroat SEO environment.

There are so many trade-offs that are hard to evaluate from the outside that I'm a lot more understanding of "weird" names (typified by the notorious Google example) than I used to be.