ANYWhere Travel Planner

Our ideal landing page, where you can put in budget, place, time and search
What our site will look like in the simplest form
Our website draft built with React.js

Inspiration

As college students with limited budgets, every time we want to travel somewhere we always need to spend hours on hunting for the best price deals on hotels, plane tickets, and car rentals, and it is just not really feasible with exams and other obligations. As students, we don’t really have a hard requirement on which specific date we want to travel but mostly depend on budget and deals, and are more flexible in dates as we have many breaks. If only there is one website that calculates the best routes for you within your budget, given your ideal location and an estimated time frame. Hence we come up with this project.

What it does

In scratch, ideally, it should return the search results from multiple engines such as Airbnb, Bookings, TripAdvisor, Hertz, UnitedAirlines, etc., and calculate the ideal route within the given budget. It would provide customers with many different combinations that customers can choose from. Customers can choose either to use the entire plan, or the specific component in one component and add to shopping cart, then they can pay on a single link the different tickets, hotel reservations, and rentals to save time and energy.

How we built it

For the front end of the project, we used React.js as the primary javascript library to build our functional website, providing a user-friendly interface. For the backend, we utilized Flask and Tripadvisor's API to search the airlines and performed analysis on the dataset returned by the API, as also hotels, and car rental data. We extract the data from different APIs and attempted to connect the front end with back-end data that prompt the search engine on our landing page.

Challenges we ran into

We had trouble finding the correct APIs for the travel info, and it was also hard for beginners to learn web development from scratch. Many of our teammates are clueless about how to actually achieve the idea. We have to learn React in one night and accomplish a rather complicated function. After staying up all night we are currently able to prompt a search list on our landing page and have a running backend that extracts useful data from the various APIs. It is very difficult to conceptualize things and we are attempting to extract from an enormous database which is extremely difficult given the time constraint and knowledge gap.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to learn Flask and React in one night and have a functioning back end and a front end that are able to achieve the simplest feature of our website. We were able to break down an enormous project into smaller building blocks and accomplish one function at a time.

We successfully built a running microservice.

What we learned

We learned to use Figma from scratch, designed an interactive prototype, and projected it onto a real website. We also learned to not rely on classroom knowledge but acquire industry expertise from scratch and self-taught ourselves essential programming languages and functionalities.

What's next for Anywhere travel info

We are only at the first step of our website. Next, we want to build more features and connect all the data space in one user interface, as well as add functionalities of checking out shopping cards, and introducing more filters.