Route Scout

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  Route Scout

Inspiration

Have you ever wanted to plan a trip but didn’t know where to start? That’s exactly the problem we set out to solve during our time at Hackbeanpot. We wanted to remove the overwhelm from travel planning and create a tool that makes the journey just as exciting as the destination.

What it does

Route Scout lets you input your start point, end point, and any places you want to visit along the way. Add your estimated budget and the number of days you plan to spend at each location, press generate, and watch as our algorithm creates a fully personalized travel plan. It ensures you hit every stop along the way optimally while eating and sleeping within your budget.

How we built it

We built Route Scout using Next JS, and Tailwind CSS and deployed it on Vercel. The app leverages the Google Places API alongside our custom algorithm to find the most popular and convenient stops by comparing data like location, ratings, and price over a vast database. For the visual side, we created most of our images using generative AI, with additional assets pulled from free-to-use websites.

Challenges we ran into

A challenge we ran into was optimizing the Google API costs. Since Google doesn't update the amount we spend immediately, it was hard for us to tell if we were overspending with the number of requests we sending to Google Maps API. A large amount of work went into minimizing the number of times various API calls were utilized in our algorithm.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our design—creating the moving car was difficult but definitely worth it! We are also proud of our app's flexibility in picking quality options while staying within the budget range.

What we learned

We all had varying levels of experience, so Joshua learned more about integrating the backend, design, and Tailwind. George worked on building the algorithm and learned how to use Google Maps API. Finally, Daniel had prior experience designing websites but also learned how to animate the car.

What's next for Route Scout

A future improvement we could make to the app is integrating Google’s Direction and Navigation APIs. This would let us display the trip’s path on a map, with different colored markers for each stop. We would also want to make it compatible with more screen sizes.

Built With

• api
• github
• google-maps
• next-js
• react
• tailwind
• vercel