Meet In The Middle

Flights selection for friends in Paris and Oslo

Inspiration

Every member of our team is an international student, so we have a lot of friends abroad and some of us are even in a long distance relationship. We are trying to see each other often, but we have a tight budget and we can't afford to spend a lot of money on flights. Fortunately, we have noticed that it is sometimes cheaper to take advantage of airline sales and get flights to another city rather than fly to see each other at our respective homes. This is awesome because we can not only see each other cheaply but also discover new cities and meet some wonderful people.

What it does

Meet In The Middle is the only existing web application that allows you to browse flights to any destination from multiple starting points. So if you are here in London and your friend is back in Bratislava, you enter the 2 airports of origin and our web app offers you the selection of the cheapest flights that allow you to meet in different cities around the world. The flights have approximately matching arrival times, so you don't spend too much time on your own.

How we built it

We used skyscanner API to get the flight schedules and their prices. We process this information in our Python backend and show it nicely on frontend build using jquery and bulma css framework. We also use Google Maps API heavily, not only to conveniently plot the flight routes, but also to receive autocomplete or stock pictures to beautify our UI.

Challenges we ran into

We were having big problems with rate limiting on Skyscanner API, which is particularly strict on free account. Otherwise we were having trouble limiting the number of queries to Google Maps API, which is terribly slow.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are happy we were able to finish this hack in short time (we only had 16 hours, because we started of with a different idea that proved itself infeasible). Moreover, we feel that our product actually solves a real problem we were having and we are hoping to use it over the next years.

What's next for Meet In The Middle

We accumulated a bit of spaghetti code during the hackathon, so we need to do some refactoring to make the code maintainable. We are hoping to keep it online for anyone who wants to use it, even if it is only the 5 of us.