OnlyFly

Travel the world, swap your home

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Inspiration

We wanted to redefine the way people travel. Flights are often the biggest cost barrier — but accommodation is a close second. What if you could remove that cost entirely? That’s how OnlyFly was born: a platform where you swap your home with someone else and only pay for the flight.

Inspired by Skyscanner’s “Perfect Reunion” challenge, we envisioned a smart way to help friends and travelers worldwide find a destination and exchange homes, combining emotional preferences, environmental impact, and budget optimization — all powered by AI.

What it does

  • Add their home and travel preferences (mood, interests, budget, dates).
  • Get AI-powered home-swap matches based on personal, geographic, and sustainable criteria.
  • Receive flight suggestions to matched destinations using Skyscanner data.
  • See green travel scores, estimated CO₂, and reviews of other homes.
  • (Planned) Share a group wallet for flight bookings and security deposits via Revolut.
  • (Planned) View personal stats and ranking in a Grafana dashboard.

How we built it

  • Frontend: React Native (Expo)
  • Backend: Firebase (Authentication, Firestore, Cloud Functions)
  • AI Matching: Clustering-based matching enhanced with rule-based constraints (budget, travel time, availability)

  • External APIs:

    • ✅ Skyscanner
    • ✅ Gemini
    • ⚠️ Revolut and Grafana (planned, but not fully integrated due to time constraints)

Challenges we ran into

  • complexity and time pressure prevented us from integrating Revolut’s API and Grafana’s Infinity Plugin.
  • Skyscanner API access required a workaround using mocked data to simulate real-time results.
  • Designing a meaningful matching algorithm was difficult — balancing user desires, house data, and ecological impact needed constant tuning.
  • Implementing real-time group coordination for trip planning proved too time-consuming to finalize in the hackathon window.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Created a working prototype that demonstrates the full user flow: from home upload to travel suggestion.
  • Developed a smart, hybrid matching algorithm that balances soft and hard constraints.
  • Designed an elegant UI for both solo and group travel coordination.
  • Defined scalable plans for future integrations (Revolut, Grafana) with clean, modular code.

What we learned

  • How to design AI-driven matching systems under tight constraints.
  • How to plan integrations with complex third-party APIs (Skyscanner, Revolut, Grafana) — even if we couldn’t finish them in time.
  • That user experience and storytelling can make even a partial prototype stand out.

What's next for OnlyFly

  • Finalize the Revolut integration to enable shared wallets, flight purchases, and deposit automation.
  • Connect our backend to Grafana dashboards to visualize user trust scores, CO₂ impact, and travel stats.
  • Publish the mobile app for closed beta testing among early users and home-swappers.
  • Train the matching model with real user data to increase accuracy and personalization.
  • Add social features like trip groups, calendar sync, and in-app messaging.
  • Add suggestions for places, restaurants, activities, etc.. with the previous information given.
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