Flight-Concierge

Stay On Time

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Inspiration

Always rushing through the airport halls while your flight is currently boarding? Or are you one of those people who got bored out of their minds while waiting for your flight?

What it does

With the Flight Concierge, you will never have to be either anymore! Flight Concierge is a mobile app that can let you know when you should leave for the airport to make your flight in time without being too early. All we need is your flight information (Departure time and date, flight number, airport code) and your preferred modes of transportation (public transport, Uber, Lyft, or driving your own car).

How we built it

Along with the information you provide us, we pull current traffic information and TSA wait-time to estimate when you should leave for the airport using different modes of transportation. We used different kinds of APIs such as Google Map, Uber, Lyft, TSA, and the flight tracker to get that information and analyze them for you. We primarily used react-native to build the front-end so that it is compatible with both ios and android and used Flask for the backend.

Challenges we ran into

  1. We initially didn't think that two different flights can have the same flight numbers, airline codes, and departure date. Therefore, we decided to ask more information about the flight from the users, such as airport code and departure time, to make sure that the flight information we will get from the users is unique.
  2. We have to verify each users' input for the flight information they enter before doing the analysis. However, all APIs we have found so far only supported flights that are happening today or tomorrow. Hence, we decided to create a web-scraper for Flightstats using Beautiful Soup and Selenium to solve this issue. Unfortunately, we were not able to finish this.
  3. We also initially had a hard time using Azure since this is our first time using it. However, through the help from the mentors, we were able to run our APIs that will do all the flight analysis and third-parties API integration on Azure.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. We were able to finish the project by the deadline

What we learned

  1. How to speed up a VM on Azure
  2. How to use React Native for creating mobile apps since this is our first time using it

What's next for Flight-Concierge

  1. We use a static waiting time for the Airport and baggage check-ins since we could not find any real-time APIs for that. Therefore, we would like to do some machine learning analysis next time to predict the waiting time for those two check-ins based on the historical check-in waiting time datasets.
  2. We also want to provide the feature where users can schedule Uber or Lyft ride in advance.
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