CarryOn

Inspiration

Planning a trip with friends sounds fun until the group chat fills up with different dates, different budgets, and destination suggestions that never lead to a decision. We created CarryOn to make that process easier. We wanted to help groups move from talking about a trip to actually planning one.

What it does

CarryOn keeps the important parts of group-trip planning in one place. You can create a trip, add friends with their budgets and availability, suggest destinations, and record everyone’s votes. The website finds overlapping travel windows and ranks destinations based on votes and affordability. Once the group decides, they can confirm their destination and dates, add accommodation details and activities, and print a trip summary.

How we built it

We built CarryOn with Python and Flask, used SQLite to store trip information, and designed the UI with HTML and CSS. The backend runs in Python.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges was comparing availability fairly while accounting for different preferred trip lengths. We also needed to handle situations where no destination fit everyone’s budget or no dates worked for the whole group.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud that CarryOn has a complete, working planning flow. Friends, destinations, votes, and itineraries are saved between sessions, and the website explains how its recommendations are calculated. We also fixed the interface with many rounds of feedback, making the website more user-friendly.

What we learned

We learned how to connect a Flask website to a database and turn individual preferences into useful group recommendations. We also learned that handling empty boxes, different preferences, and deleted data is a very important part of the program.

What's next for CarryOn

Our next step is to let friends join through a shared link and enter their own preferences instead of having one person manage everything on one device/account. We’d also like to add live travel estimates, more flexible date matching, and better itinerary organization. The goal is to keep CarryOn simple while making it more useful for groups planning real trips.