Guilt Tripper

Inspiration

Every friend group has dozens of messages saying "We should go to Japan!" or "Let's do a cottage trip!" but most never turn into actual plans. We wanted to build something that remembers those abandoned ideas and make them actually happen.

What it does

Guilt Tripper is a Discord bot that detects trip ideas mentioned in chat, saves them as unplanned trips in a database, and occasionally jumps into conversations or responds to slash commands to remind your server about the trips you've been procrastinating. Guilt Tripper also provide concrete plans with the trip plans with Hotel booking links in the destinations included in the responses.

How we built it

We built Guilt Tripper using the Discord API, a Discord bot framework, and Genini API to identify and extract trip ideas from conversations. The bot stores trips in a SQL database and uses scheduled prompts and slash commands to surface forgotten plans. We also used Stay22's API for the Hotel metadatas to provide group chats information on the hotels in the target destination.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was determining whether a trip was actually abandoned. We needed to distinguish between ideas that were forgotten and those that had already been planned or completed. Detecting trip discussions accurately was also difficult, since people often mention places casually or joke about traveling. Combining keyword filtering with Gemini helped improve both performance and detection accuracy.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of creating a bot that feels like part of the conversation instead of just another command-based tool. The combination of passive memory and humorous reminders makes it genuinely fun to use.

What we learned

We learned how to build an event-driven Discord bot, integrate AI for natural language understanding, and design features that enhance conversations without disrupting them.

What's next for Guilt Tripper

We want to add voting, itinerary suggestions, calendar integration, travel deal alerts, and personalized reminders based on who's interested in each trip. Our goal is to help friend groups actually turn ideas into memories.