Road.io

Inspiration

As spring break approaches for many college students, our team and peers have felt the stress of planning the perfect trip. Trying to coordinate payments with each other, staying on budget, and finding the hottest places to go can feel daunting. We wanted to create a website that can streamline this process all in one space.

What it does

Road.io allows for the creation of vacation groups, where users can input expected trip budgets as a group, as well as mark desired spots to visit based on AI-powered suggestions from a chatbot style interaction. For all trip-related expenses, users can connect their bank accounts to split group bills while gaining and using respective credit card points/airline mileage.

How we built it

Backend/API: Node.js + Express (REST routes, middleware, validation, error handling), with axios for external API calls. Frontend/UI: React + react-dom, with map UI via react-map-gl (MapLibre mode) + maplibre-gl. Maps & Geo: Open map stack using OpenFreeMap tiles + Nominatim geocoding (no Mapbox token dependency). Payments: Dual settlement flows — fiat/off-chain plus optional crypto/on-chain using @solana/web3.js; SOL pricing from CoinGecko. Financial insights: Capital One Nessie sandbox API integration for spending profile and trip budget simulation. Storage & Infra: Local JSON persistence for dev + @upstash/redis for serverless persistence; deployed on Vercel. Auth & Comms: Auth/session endpoints + email workflows using nodemailer. Testing & DX: node:test + supertest for API tests, npm run dev watch mode for fast iteration.

Challenges we ran into

We had many ideas of how to incorporate different features and company products within our work. However, time did not allow for us to complete a fully finished product with all of these ideas. We had to weigh the pros and cons of each idea and find what was the most integral to our functionality and brand identity, while serving the biggest audience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our interactive chat bot that can suggest places to visit or activities based on many factors such as destination, time of year, initial group budget, and remaining budget after other planned activities. We are also proud of our complex cost splitting features. While being able to pay other users directly from the website and also getting the most out of your credit card points, we feel that we have made an efficient product.

What we learned

We learned how to prioritize work more effectively, while delegating tasks more efficiently based on team member's strengths. Working with many different company products also helped with our integration skills of many different technologies and we learned about new software such as vector databases (which we had not used previously). Overall, this experience taught us how to think quick on our feet and the importance of problem-solving quickly.

What's next for Rode.io

We hope to expand to a mobile app in the future so we can reach a wider audience. We also hope to integrate higher security protocols that will allow for actual bank account connections. This will also be implemented for overall safer user account creation. Finally, we plan on integrating an accomodation interface for hotel bookings apart from flight and activity bookings.

Built With

• actian
• capital-one
• expres
• mapbox
• node.js
• openai
• python
• solana