MYMILE

Your AI-powered travel companion for smarter, more personalized journeys — your smile, every mile.

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Inspiration

The idea behind MYMILE came from a personal experience with my family.

When my mother and sister were preparing for their Umrah trip, I noticed how overwhelmed they were with all the travel arrangements. They struggled to organize the details of their journey, figure out what they needed to prepare, and decide what products they needed to buy before traveling and during their stay.

I realized that planning a trip, especially one with specific needs like Umrah, can quickly become confusing and stressful. People often have to search across multiple platforms, compare different options, and piece everything together themselves.

That experience made me think: What if there was one intelligent platform that could understand a traveler's needs and bring everything together in one place?

That's how MYMILE was born.

I wanted to build more than just a travel planner. I wanted to create an AI-powered travel companion that understands each person's journey, provides personalized recommendations, helps discover relevant products, compares travel options, and makes planning easier from beginning to end.

And that inspired our slogan:

"Your Smile, Every Mile."

What it does

MYMILE is an AI-powered travel companion designed to simplify the entire travel-planning experience through one personalized platform.

Users can create trips by entering their destination, travel dates, purpose, budget, preferences, and a description of what they need for their journey.

MYMILE then helps them with: Personalized Hotel Discovery: Find hotel recommendations based on the trip details and preferences, with external booking options.

Hotel Comparison: Compare hotels using an interactive table, making it easier to evaluate available options.

AI-Powered Product Recommendations: An AI agent understands the traveler's description and identifies relevant products for the journey. Through Channel3, it searches real products from different retailers.

Manual Product Search: Users can also search for specific products directly.

Budget Breakdown: Organize and explore estimated expenses across different categories.

AI Travel Chatbot: Ask travel-related questions and get contextual recommendations, ideas, and suggestions based on the trip.

MYMILE also offers Free and Premium plans, with Premium unlocking additional features and product-shopping links.

How we built it

We built MYMILE using a full-stack architecture:

Frontend: React, TypeScript, and Vite to create a responsive and interactive user experience.

Backend: Python and FastAPI to handle business logic, API integrations, authentication, and data processing.

AI: Groq powers the AI agent and conversational experience. It interprets users' travel descriptions, identifies their needs, and helps generate personalized recommendations.

Channel3: Integrated to search real products across retailers and provide relevant product results.

AG Grid Community: Used to build interactive data tables for hotel comparison and multi-category budget breakdown.

PayPal: Integrated PayPal Sandbox Checkout to handle Premium payments, including secure order creation, capture, and payment verification.

APIMatic: We used the PayPal Server SDK Context Plugin in Claude Code during development. Its skills helped us work with SDK initialization, OAuth authentication, API endpoints, error handling, models, and payment testing.

We also implemented caching, validation, and backend safeguards to improve reliability and protect important operations.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was making AI recommendations genuinely relevant instead of simply returning products that matched a few keywords.

Travel needs can vary significantly depending on the destination, trip purpose, duration, audience, and personal preferences. We worked on building a description-driven recommendation pipeline that prioritizes what users explicitly ask for while using the rest of their trip information as supporting context.

Another challenge was integrating multiple external services while keeping the experience consistent. We had to handle API errors, unavailable results, caching, and different response formats.

Implementing PayPal payments was also challenging because payment operations require careful verification. We needed to ensure that Premium access is granted only after a successful and verified payment, while preventing duplicate captures and handling uncertain payment states safely.

Finally, bringing all these features together into one clear and easy-to-use interface required continuous testing and refinement.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that MYMILE brings several parts of travel planning together in one platform instead of making users jump between multiple services.

Some accomplishments we're especially proud of include:

Building an AI-powered travel experience that uses the user's own trip description to guide product recommendations.

Integrating Channel3 to retrieve real products from different retailers.

Creating interactive hotel comparison and budget breakdown experiences using AG Grid Community.

Implementing a PayPal Sandbox payment flow with server-side payment verification and Premium activation.

Building a conversational AI travel assistant that can provide contextual recommendations.

Creating a platform that was inspired by a real family experience and designed to solve a practical problem.

Most importantly, we're proud to have transformed a personal problem into a working project with the potential to make travel planning less stressful.

What we learned

Building MYMILE taught us that integrating AI into a product is about much more than connecting an LLM to an application.

We learned how important it is to provide AI with the right context, validate its outputs, and build safeguards around its decisions. We also learned how to integrate external APIs, manage asynchronous operations and caching, and handle payment flows with security and reliability in mind.

Working with Groq, Channel3, AG Grid, PayPal, and the APIMatic PayPal Server SDK Context Plugin gave us practical experience with different technologies and how they can work together in a real-world application.

Most importantly, we learned how to turn a real-life problem into a technical solution, make trade-offs, test assumptions, and keep improving the product throughout development.

What's next for MYMILE

We see MYMILE as something that can grow beyond a travel-planning website into a more complete travel companion.

Our next steps include:

Expanding hotel and travel-service integrations to provide more reliable and diverse options.

Improving AI personalization and recommendation accuracy.

Supporting more destinations, languages, and different types of journeys.

Enhancing budget planning with more detailed expense tracking.

Improving the product discovery experience with broader retailer coverage.

Exploring additional travel tools that can help users throughout their journey, not just before departure.

Our long-term vision is simple: make every journey easier to plan, more personalized, and more enjoyable — so travelers can focus less on the stress and more on the experience.

MYMILE – Your Smile, Every Mile.

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