Hipmunk to add flexible date search for flights

Hipmunk launched a flexible-date search feature for flight search today.

Of course, anything Hipmunk does it does in a Hipmunkish sort of way so rather than add a drop-down menu with flexible dates it is adding plus and minus symbol buttons to its date fields. The feature looks like this:

And, Hipmunk displays flight options on a single screen with a single line representing midnight at your departure airport each day “so you can get a high-level sense for which flights are on which day and which ones are overnight,” says Adam Goldstein, founder and CEO. The results page looks like this:

You can also use sliders to adjust your options over multiple days.

The whole idea is to provide a consolidated view of your flight options over several days and to provide consumers with the tools to pare their choices accordingly.

“People have been asking for a flexible-date feature since we launched Hipmunk, but we didn’t want to roll one out until we could do it in a way that was worthy of placement on our front page,” Goldstein says.

He claims the feature is more useful than they way it is implemented on other sites.