EventSpi.re

Inspiration

There are lots of tools available to find flights and hotels - but only when you are travelling on a specific date. Most of the time our plans aren't that specific. We have a general idea that we would like to see our favorite band play, or we might suggest to friends down the pub that it would be a great idea to see our team playing in an away game this season.

Let's say you want to see F.C. Barcelona play some time this season. Your only option at the moment is to run loads of Skyscanner searches and even more hotel searches for each and every league fixture date this season. Crazy. And you'll probably keep that in a spreadsheet. Pain. And not very inspiring.

How it works

EventSpi.re finds the best combo of flights and hotels for the events that inspire you, so we can inspire you to travel there.

TECH: Our microservices architecture handles event services, flight and hotel services, and aggregates them together to find the most suitable event.

Challenges I ran into

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We managed to combine Node.js, .NET and PHP services together to create a cohesive API. We have been researching microservices over the last few months and it was a great opportunity to bring a project together in a challenging timeline. Particularly proud that the team worked together to effectively.

What I learned

Focus fast. Don't use alpha versions if you want it to work.

What's next for EventSpi.re

Inspiration is a part of the travel market which no player has nailed yet. Skyscanner help by allowing us to search by flexiable dates, but this isn't linked with the hotel in any way. Also - they don't compel you to travel. You need to find your own inspiration, they just facilitate the planning.

Bringing a tool like this to market as a direct consumer website is next to impossible. There are too many giant players, with even bigger budgets. To get traction, you need to play smart.

For a service like this to succeed, it needs to find new avenues which travel hasn't reached yet. The API we developed could be used for example to generate custom audio ads tailored specifically for your musical taste. "Why not travel to see U2 this summer. We can get you to Munich to see them for EUR199". When events are announced and hashtags are trending, EventSpi.re should be tweeting the event URL. It should be possible for TNooz to embed a widget in their site or mobile app to present packages to get you to the next event in Hamburg or San Francisco.