Getaway Guru

Inspiration

Getaway Guru is a cultural experience-focused social media application tailored to trendsetters, college students, and young adults that fosters a traveling community in which users can share and export prior trips by combining automated trip planning, ticket booking, and social media exporting through shareable links.

We’ve seen a lot of potential particularly in the advertising industry with fashion models tagging clothing items, swimwear, and shoes in Instagram posts as well as Facebook Marketplace. We wanted to create a way for young influencers and regular college students alike to not only post about their travels, but also be able to link their travel plans and booking itineraries so that others can replicate their experiences. Thus, we built Getaway Guru, a one-stop shop for fully-automated bookings based on other user travel lists, automating payments for airbnb, and generating new plans for customizable travel experiences.

For college students who are short on cash and short on time, Getaway Guru provides the best way to slash travel expenses and provide hassle free light-speed travel planning.

What it does

Getaway Guru is also a hub for new cultural experiences with cultural themed special events, cultural social nights, and cultural themed hotels bookings. This feature allows foreigners to be fully immersed in the local culture and experience truly exquisite local cuisine recommended by locals themselves.

Getaway Guru aggregates data analytics on travel preferences across 6 sectors including monuments, food, nightlife, museums, theater, and events allowing users to easily compare travel styles to select the optimal plan.

The main landing page of Getaway Guru guides users through a short form filling in Destination, Start and End Date, and Budget. Then, users are taken to a screen to book their Airbnbs for the duration of the trip. Users can then navigate to a mapping page where they scroll through a list of recommended events in 6 sectors, selecting the ones they would like for the travel itinerary. Our internal Traveling Salesman algorithm then computes the optimal sequence of events to generate the optimal path that minimizes the travel distance. Internally, all finalized plans are saved and users are prompted with the ability to export plans to the public listings. These plans can then be voted on by the community through a liking system and any user can download and book entire travel itineraries with just a tap of the mouse.

The main feature of Getaway Guru is the ability to share entire travel itineraries with just the click of a single button. We generate unique shareable links for direct tagging within posts in platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook, as well as blasting options for Twitter, Whatsapp, and Email so you can share your travel plans with anyone in your network.

How we built it

Our frontend was built with React, Next.js, and Tailwind CSS. We created 3 API endpoints for the AirbnbAPI, the YelpAPI, and the DirectionsAPI. The Airbnb API generated the Airbnb listings page by querying live data from Airbnb’s website with information about address, pricing, number of baths, bedrooms, and beds, as well as amenities like wifi, pools, and jacuzzis. We then filtered the large list of results that were generated to the top 10 Airbnb’s with the best pricing and rating in the user’s location of choice. Next, we called the YelpAPI to return a list of restaurants, monuments, museums, nightclubs, and other activities to do in the city. We allowed users to select which activities they wanted to do, and we saved this data to our MongoDB database. We then calculated the optimal travel agenda with our internal Traveling Salesman algorithm and the DirectionsAPI, generating the most efficient path to all the event destinations.

Finally, for the marketplace screen where users can view other travelers’s travel itineraries, we make a massive fetch to the MongoDB database and dump out all the information including address, pricing, Airbnb ordering, and activity list. Finally, we generate a unique id for every public travel itinerary on our marketplace screen for quick sharing on all forms of social media including Instagram, BeReal, Facebook, and YikYak.

We also support CRUD operations for liking posts and creating posts.

Challenges we ran into

API Integration, fetching data from MongoDB, calculating distance between monuments

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of creating a fully integrated platform with all features for travel booking and being able to integrate 3 APIs and the database to our app.

What we learned

We learned to navigate the travel industry and learned new tech stacks and technologies.

What's next for Getaway Guru

We envision a suite of features including automating airline ticket booking by using the Duffel API, the ability to compare prices across multiple vendors similar to Honey.com, and adding a shopping cart with a single checkout button that auto fills all payment information and purchases all tickets for the user.

We are also looking for ways to monetize the app by taking a 2% cut of all purchases through our platform. This way, we can incentivize users to post their travel agendas on the site by giving them a 1% cut of all ticket orders from other users that utilized their travel plans for booking.