Inspiration
As the summer break starts and COVID-19 restrictions are easing out this year, many of us have started to travel out of Singapore. After 3 long years of travel restrictions, we are all excited to travel to countries we once visited to relieve our memories and countries we have yet to visit to experience their local culture. We all know that COVID-19 has took a toll on businesses, and tourists seldom visit less-known restaurants and attractions, which are equally good. Finding good places to visit is always a struggle. As such, we decided that the best and most important way to enhance tourists’ experiences is to help them uncover or rediscover hidden gems of the country.
Furthermore, overseas planning is now made more difficult as we have to take into consideration of the health guidelines of the respective countries. Hence, we wanted a one-stop application where everyone need not do their research with so many different websites, that can serve as their go-to travel guide at any point of their travel.
What it does
TravelMate has 3 main unique features:
Firstly, the recommendations section allows users to view or post reviews of the attractions or food places which they have positive feedback on. By providing users with the control of posting reviews, this encourages honest feedback from customers who truly want others to visit those places.
Secondly, the health guidelines section allow users to easily check the COVID-19 entry requirements of the country they are looking to visit. This will allow them to be fully prepared and have all the relevant documents needed at hand for a smooth and enjoyable trip.
Thirdly, the travel services section provides the user with some help or information that they might need on their travels. Some examples include translation and the purchase of Sim Cards/wifi routers. By having these services at hand, users will be able to travel more conveniently and be more at ease.
How we built it
Language: Python Medium: Telegram
Challenges we ran into
Our group does not have the experience of building a telegram bot from scratch, so we needed to study and research about how to build one in the short time span we have. This was indeed challenging. However, we were glad that we chose to try out something new at this hackathon as we took away and benefited a lot from these short few days.
Also the time constraints also made the hackathon challenging. We had a lot to do but there was not a lot of time to actualise them. However, that instead made us more productive, staying up on nights just to improve our telegram bot and build a working one to submit in this hackathon.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The biggest takeaway we had in this hackathon was definitely how to build a working telegram bot. Since we do not have the experience in this prior to the hackathon, we needed to self-study and research a lot on telegram bots. Through this event, we gained more technical knowledge which will hopefully be beneficial to us in our studies and also our future careers.
What we learned
We also learnt important values and skills such as the willingness to step out of our comfort zones to try something new, perseverance and also teamwork. The willingness to step out of our comfort zone was what allowed us to gain our biggest takeaway as mentioned above. Without this, we would never have picked up how to make a telegram bot, which can be a useful skill to have, and stuck to making a mobile application which is more familiar to us. We needed a lot of perseverance for this hackathon as we needed to come up with a solution and create it from scratch within a short span of 2.5 days. Without it, we would have given up in the initial stages of this hackathon which will defeat the whole purpose of attending the hackathon. Teamwork was also important because we needed to rely on each others’ strengths, abilities and skills to come up with our product. By having more brains and hands, we were able to multitask which allowed us to complete our final product on time and also successfully.
What's next for [Digital Disruptors] Travel Mate
We hope to include more detailed information and features to our telegram bot such as travel services such as the ability to suggest itineraries or also information on travel visas. With these new additions, we will make the users’ travels even more convenient and smooth.
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