Inspiration
My dad once had a 4 hour heated shouting match about tickets with an airline.
To say that airlines receive extreme amounts of phone calls is an understatement— from cancelations, seat change requests, and so many more. ustomers want to be seated with their families, and airlines want customer retention as well as more resources to assist with real issues over calls.
The solution was simple to us - a better way of allowing passengers to be seated in a way they’re most comfortable, while improving American Airlines’ customer satisfaction rates. Our solution is called SeatWise.
During the ideation process for our project, our team drew inspiration from a multitude of sources. We were really interested in building a tool focused on some sort of service and customer experience and hence watched a lot of Youtube tutorials on how to approach SAAS development and identify worthy problems. We started by talking about what issues American Airlines faces on a daily basis. We did some research and found that telephone customer service is one of AA’s biggest weak-points. Their influx of phone calls for simple seat-swaps and reservation changes leads to hours of wait time and lack of proper attention to each individual passenger’s respective situation. We immediately recognized that the airline industry faces the largest amount of customer support phone calls, predominantly about altering a current reservation.
What it does
The fruition of our restless yet productive night is SeatWise. Instead of booking specific seats like the legacy American Airlines portal requires, SeatWise instead has the customer choose from a variety of EXPERIENCES— a window/middle/aisle seat, no preference, or seating with family. The trained algorithm then automatically creates a seating chart which maximizes possible customer satisfaction based on the preferences entered. This is not only to save time for employees and attendants but also improve customer satisfaction and retention rates—studies show that customer experience alongside price is the strongest factor in returning customers for the travel industry. SeatWise also sports a dynamic demand-based pricing engine, which accounts for seat specific details and is backed by flight-dependent API-enabled data for further information on the destination location, aircraft make and model, as well as the aircraft capacity.
How we built it
We started by spending the first moments of the challenge brainstorming pages and ideating for how it could be built. We created mockups on pen and paper and then initiated with React.js. We used Firebase for the backend and kept track of each seat type’s current availability in order to inform the customer if their selection is possible given the current capacity and existing seating requests. Instead of knowing where exactly someone will sit (ex. John in 4B), our algorithm just keeps track of whether a combination is possible given the current requests (ex. John is currently assigned any of the B (middle) seats). We then crafted front-end and purchased a .tech domain, which we created DNS records for in Cloudflare after changing the name servers. Finally, we hosted the code with OnRender and created CNAME records to attach it to our custom domain.
Challenges we ran into
Throughout the challenge we faced a lot of challenges as we all are relatively new to the Hackathon community. We had initially planned to use a no-code tool such as Figma for our front-end, however after struggling with Tailwind CSS export failures and buggy code, we decided to learn how to create front-end pages on our own. This was a major challenge as none of us had any real experience with UI/UX design, and we had to watch a lot of YouTube and Udemy tutorials in the past 24 hours. We also struggled to remain motivated to code late in the night as everyone was exhausted. (A 4am keyboard slip-up just destroyed the entire project) Though thankfully, due to our persistence and willingness to face the challenges with an open-mind, we are here today with an impactful working product that we are extremely proud of.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
As first-time hackers who are still in high-school, TAMUhack was truly an amazing experience. Throughout the competition, we gained a plethora of valuable skills. This meant that we learned how to identify a worthy problem and implement our ideas into tangible products. We went from zero to hero on our path with React.js and Tailwind CSS, and gained many skills about effective coding and design choices, along with product management and presentation. Overall, we learned many computer science and entrepreneurship skills that can be utilized outside of the competition and we’re really grateful to have received this opportunity
What we learned
During this hackathon, our team is very proud of creating a fully functional product and solving a real-world problem. As we are novice participants in the hackathon and in creating apps in general, we learned a lot from the experience and every step was exciting to see our ideas be born into life. We are also proud of the knowledge we learned, from areas such as market research, ideation, publication, and pitching. These skills are not just pure CS school skills, but real-world skills that we had never learned before. Lastly, we are proud of our commitment to discipline and endurance throughout the hackathon. We slept a mere 2 hours on Saturday night, working till 7 am and waking back up at 9. Even when bugs got hard to solve, we worked through YouTube videos and thought of new solutions till we reached our goal of publishing.
What's next for SeatWise.tech
We aspire to continue working on this idea in order to further the concept and make it something that can be truly impactful. In particular, we plan to work extremely hard on our UI/UX skills and incorporate more seating elements into the algorithm (exit rows, airline classes, priority boarding, baggage space) in order to round off the user experience and maximize the utility for airlines.
Built With
- cloudflare
- css3
- javascript
- onrender
- react
- scikit-learn
- tailwind
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