Aloha

Inspiration

Car rental services for travelling purposes have been increasingly popular, especially with the increasing digitalization, and the rising travel and tourism sector. It not only provides tourists with great convenience travelling from one place to another, but also saves them time.

However, a higher reliance on cars also means a higher carbon dioxide emissions, which heavily contributes to the already worsening global warming. So then, how do we allow tourists to travel as they wish, while reducing their carbon footprints?

The answer lies in our tourism carpooling service, Aloha.

What it does

With the mobile application, users can easily connect with other users who intend to travel to the same area on the specified days. By browsing others’ itinerary or making their own, they can reach out to users to carpool during tourism, reducing the number of vehicles necessary for the trip. This not only helps to save the environment, but also on their car rental fees, and make new travel buddies on the way!

How we built it

We built the wireframes of Aloha mobile application using Figma.

After extensive market research, we collated the pain points and selling points of current carpooling and car rental services, and developed our own tourism carpooling service.

Challenges we ran into

With the limited timeframe of the hackathon, it was challenging to develop a fully-functional mobile application with both frontend and backend in place. Hence, we decided to work on building an extensive wireframe that can fully represent all the different features and use cases of our tourism carpooling service mobile application.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is a novel idea that has been developed by our team members, which is one-of-a-kind in the tourism industry. Carpooling services mainly cater to locals and only operate on single-trip basis, whereas car rentals that mainly cater for tourists do not provide carpooling services, hence may be expensive and detrimental for the environment if travelling alone or in smaller groups.

We have also successfully built a minimum viable product that showcases all the features we intended to include in the Aloha mobile application. All the features of our tourism carpooling service included were also backed up by thorough market research.

We have also developed this idea based on the 3 key aspects of innovation: desirability via extensive market research on user needs; viability via the development of a sustainable business model; and feasibility where our team's strength lies parallel with app development and design.

What we learned

We have learnt more about sustainable tourism during our market research. We have also learnt more about the design process, where we aim to build our idea based on 3 key aspects of desirability, viability and feasibility.

What's next for Aloha

First of all, with the wireframes for Aloha completed, our team would be conducting user survey and feedback to validate and polish up our existing software platform. After refinement, we would then proceed with developing a fully functional mobile application with frontend and backend in place. With the fully functional mobile application, we can then reach out to potential partners for our mobile application, such as existing car rental services, travel agencies and tourism boards of various countries.

Built With

• figma