Inspiration

Travel plans are scattered across emails, PDFs, booking sites, and apps. We wanted one calm place that answers a more useful question: Is my trip actually ready?

What it does

DepartBuddy turns travel confirmations into a clear, day-by-day itinerary. It organizes reservations, tickets, travelers, checklists, maps, and notes. Then flags missing details, timing conflicts, and other risks before they become problems.

How we built it

We built the native iPhone and iPad app with SwiftUI and SwiftData, using private CloudKit sync. A Cloudflare Worker securely processes forwarded booking emails with deterministic parsers and a guarded AI fallback. DepartBuddy also integrates WidgetKit, EventKit, Core Spotlight, and RevenueCat. We later built an Android version.

Challenges we ran into

Travel emails are messy. Every provider uses different layouts, languages, attachments, and date formats. The hardest part wasn’t extracting data, it was preventing incorrect data from looking trustworthy while keeping sensitive travel information private.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

DepartBuddy supports five languages, offline access, private sharing, widgets, calendar sync, travel stats, and editable import review. Its email parser is tested against a growing 92-message regression corpus, helping us improve reliability without sacrificing privacy.

What we learned

AI alone isn’t reliable enough for travel data. The best system combines deterministic parsing, strict evidence validation, confidence states, and human review. Trust matters more than feature breadth.

What's next for DepartBuddy

Next, we’re focused on release hardening, real-device iCloud recovery testing, and external TestFlight feedback. After launch, we’ll improve provider coverage and explore live flight updates, without losing the privacy and reliability that define DepartBuddy.

Built With

• codex
• jetpack
• kotlin
• swift
• swiftui