Havel

Inspiration

Our team loves learning about new cultures. However, we've sometimes found it difficult to connect and truly immerse ourselves in the cultures of the areas we've been to. We also know that travel accommodations can become unaffordable in the blink of an eye. Havel combats all of the relatable issues that we just described to curate a vacation that is perfect for what you need. In addition to that, Havel puts money into the pockets of locals: instead of giving your money to a corporation, why not live like a local while helping support the local economy?

What it does

Havel utilizes a user's inputted demographics to find them a city that they're likely to fall in love with. Havel allows users to scroll through cities they've been "matched" to. When a user taps on a city they're interested in, they're taken to a page of available homestays where they will be living alongside a local. They can save homestays they're interested in to check them out again later, view host contact information and reviews, update their travel preferences, and view past bookings.

How we built it

Using Firebase and React Native, we were able to complete the project and we were able to finish the project with the use of Expo to test on our phones.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was time. Going into it, we thought that 36 hours would be plenty of time. As a result of that, our biggest adversary was our working pace. In the beginning, we worked pretty slowly, but we had to compensate for that towards the end.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the way that we collaborated and were able to divide work effectively. We are especially proud of our integration with Firestore as it was a relatively new technology to us when we arrived at HackPrinceton, yet we were able to use it heavily within numerous aspects of our app.

What we learned

We learned the ability to work together in tough constraints while learning new things along the way. For example, we were able to divide the work with our newest teammate for the UI, front end, and back end.

What's next for Havel

We'd love to keep working on Havel. We truly believe this idea has promise--and we hope others agree! In the future, we'd like to expand to offer more cities for our users to travel to. We would also like to finish our app design based on the wireframe that we designed. Above all, we'd like to optimize our recommendation system by providing it with more data so we can better train our models. We'd also like to explore other potential algorithms that would be more well-suited for this recommendation system.