FlyLite

Encouraging customers to travel greener by showing them a price and CO2 impact comparison of alternative flight/ train/ coach routes for their trip

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Inspiration

Climate change is the single largest challenge we all face as humanity. Inspired by a colleague that decided to go "flight-free" and opted to travel by land only to reduce her carbon footprint, we'd like to make it easier for more people to start travelling greener by showing them alternative travel routes and laying out the cost - monetary and environmental!

What it does

Customers go to our website, enter their start and end destination cities and their chosen date of travel. Eco-Travel will show them the best flight, train and coach travel options and show them the monetary cost and the CO2 cost (in kgCO2e) for each option. We're better than other carbon footprint calculation websites because: 1. we'll show different travel options (flights, trains and coaches) and 2. we calculate the carbon footprint more accurately by taking into account the increased carbon footprint from non-direct flights that may be cheaper but travel a longer route.

How I built it

Google Cloud's Google maps APIs (using different APIs to find flight, train, coach distances), Kiwi's API to get flight/ train routes, Trip to Carbon's API to calculate the CO2 impact of each journey, React.js, Next.js, Javascript for webdev, Flask and nginx to create server, Digital ocean to host the server

Challenges I ran into

Finding open-source travel data - many websites provided APIs but they were for business users only

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Created a vision together as a team and worked well together to contribute our parts and teach each other new skills.

What I learned

Some of us did our first bit of Javascript and CSS or learnt how to run a server Connecting the backend to the front end using a web server First use of Python lambdas

What's next for Eco-Travel

To be the next go-to Travel booking website!!! Getting customers to travel greener and using the consumer signal to convince train companies that they need to lower their price points so that customers travel more by land rather than air! Further ideas we would add to the website: For customers to get recommendations for other journey routes based on their preferences (perhaps even places that reduce their CO2 impact by travelling to). Using Twilio to provide booking confirmation SMS, travel delay updates to the customer and their family members if they want! For customers to be able to share their experiences travelling greener in the form of a dashboard on the website. Offer a service to also offset customer's journey (like Ecosia)

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