Inspiration
My girlfriend and I are poor college students, we always are wanting to travel, always are on a budget, and this life hacks challenge made me sit down and brainstorm that what I really need is a travel app that just reads me a list of the cheapest deals and doesn't care that I don't know where I want to go. I believe for everyone who wants to travel this is a must have skill.
What it does
Give Alexa your nearest city that has an airport and Alexa will read you a list of the absolute best travel deals (All Round Trips). As simple as "Alexa, flights for Seattle.."
How we built it
We have been making use of an open source travel api that keeps a massive database of flights including their prices, dates, airlines, etc. Using this data and creating an algorithm for solving best round trip deals, we accumulate a list of the best flights from your destination to various popular travel destinations. We then created our own api on top of this to present the data back in a more presentable easy to work with manner.
Our Rest api is hosted on an EC2 Server with Node js (express) and using npm Forever to keep it running without problems. AWS lambda is used for the Alexa side which makes request calls to our api.
In the try it out section, we have added a link to a website of ours that implements our api.
Challenges we ran into
Designing how we felt it was most natural to be given a large amount of flights in a clear easy to work with manner. We felt that destination, price, departure date, and airline were the main properties and with just those fields we could start reading off the list as to give off the data quicker.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Setting up the API so that it works for virtually any city however it's really just meant for in the U.S.
Creating a service that really hasn't been implemented in this manner even though there are so many flight finding services.
What we learned
How to build cleaner/easier to use JSON to work with.
How Alexa works and how brilliant the architecture behind her is, since every skill used is an actual http request with json.
What's next for Runaway Flights
Depending on how this concept is received we plan to build a mobile companion app that will allow you to keep track of the best flights, view the actual priced deal directly, and if you tell Alexa to save a specific flight she will then save it in the app.
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