Halfway.me

Inspiration

Can people meet their loved ones for less money and airlines fill up their underutilized routes? In our fast and increasingly globalized age, family members, colleagues and friends are spread all around the country and the world. Rendezvous with friends or business partners who live far away is a complex logistical problem and a financial burden. Due to market forces in airline industry, a flight to one of the person's city of origin often isn't the most affordable way for two people to meet and this effect increases when three, four or hundred people are involved.

What we do?

Halfway gives travellers the opportunity to think about their plans together and save money by finding more affordable fares for them as a group. You can call it Going Dutch or an interesting optimization problem -- Halfway helps travellers make more informed decisions. The travellers input their airports of origin and the travel dates and Halfway suggests the best place for a meeting.

Implementation

Halfway runs front-end on our NameCheap server and a back-end on our Linode, using data from Sabre API. It is written in JavaScript and Node.js with Firebase where a database is needed. NameCheap generously provided a free domain. In addition, within the team we embarked on an interesting challenge to implement an alternative version running on Microsoft Azure, using Expedia API to find best holiday packages based on the same principle.

Challenges

Although we initially came in as hardware hackers, we felt passionate that Halfway would provide a valuable service, so we pushed ourselves to explore technologies we were not familiar with in the beginning of the weekend. Thus, we essentially learned firebase and node.js in one night.