Theme: Re-defining the Post-Pandemic Traveling Landscape
Inspiration
As the tourism and aviation sectors are coming back to life after the Covid pandemic, many people are looking for engaging ways to discover new activities and a convenient way to plan their trip.
What it does
Our solution addresses the problem statement as it focuses on enhancing tourists’ experience via a single application. Our app makes it easier for tourists to discover new attractions and places, plan a customized itinerary around their location and days of travel, and find new places based on community reviews.
Our app has 4 main features:
1. Tourist Destination Recommender
Firstly, users are able to find destinations and attractions of their interest by swiping left (Dislike) or right (Like). Upon swiping right, details of the destination / attraction will be shown and users can then add them to their itinerary. The filter helps to tailor the suggestions to their traveling style. Additionally, we implemented a recommender system based on user's swiping history and commonly visited places by other users.
2. Itinerary Planner
Based on the activities the tourist has swiped right on, we add those activities to a list. Users can then use drag-and-drop to arrange the order of activities into the different days. This helps them better plan the details of their holiday.
3. Partnership with Airlines
To help optimize the operations of the aviation industry, we partner with airlines to distribute vouchers for local businesses and attractions. This helps to promote the airline as tourists that fly with them are able to redeem vouchers for activities they are interested in.
4. Community Forum
Here, users have more insight based on community reviews. Tourists can create posts with ratings, photos and write-ups about the activities to get specific and in-depth information.
How we built it
We used react-native to build the interactive frontend, which allowed us to implement interesting features such as drag-and-drop and swiping features. Our recommender system backend was implemented with the SQL database and flask.
Challenges we ran into
It was challenging to learn many interactive features as we had limited experience. We also initially faced difficulty brainstorming how to differentiate our app and make it more engaging to use.
Due to time constraint, we were also unable to implement data storage of user interactions with the app.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of being able to overcome these initial challenges and manage to think of many good ideas for making the app engaging such as our swiping feature and the drag-and-drop.
What we learned
We were able to learn more about the tourism industry and what drives and promotes it. This includes ease of discovering activities and community as feedback from others is crucial to the business. We were also able to strengthen our design thinking skills by coming up with innovative ways to engage our audience and keep them captivated.
What's next for MSVZ [Enhancing tourists' experience in Singapore]
In the future, we could include AI features to help customize and provide a detailed plan for the user's itinerary based on a questionnaire on their preferences or their user activity.
Another feature we could include is the use of AR. For many sightseeing tourist attractions, having an AR feature could help the user virtually explore the area and make informed travel plans.
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