Skyconnector

Inspiration

When people fly somewhere they usually do not know anybody flying with them and also anybody in the destination city. We thought it would be great to give the flyers a chance to connect with other flyers before the flight to get to know each other.

What it does

Our app gives users a chance to search for flights and for the flight options displayed there is also a link to a chat of that flight. Users can join the chat and see whether there are any interesting people there, which gives them one more criterion to consider when selecting the best flight for themselves. If the chat is active and there fun people there, user would be tempted to take that flight. Also, after joining the chat for the flight, the user can make new friends. He/she can be able to hang out with their new friends if they have a long layover and also in the destination city once they arrive. Also, people can ask for some help in the chat (for example, if user has too heavy baggage and some other user has light baggage they can arrange to check-in together to not overpay for baggage and so on).

How we built it

We used Skyscanner API to fetch flight information to show to the users. We also used Skyscanner's open-source Backpack to add a little bit of styling to our website. We decided to use Flask for backend and React for frontend. We also used MongoDB to store data and Apache Kafka to simulate the messaging platform.

Challenges we ran into

React components provided by Backpack were not sufficiently customizable and also Skyscanner API did not have example requests to base our implementation on. Therefore, we spent quite some time figuring out how to apply these technologies to our project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we could learn a lot of sophisticated technologies while we were developing our project. We are also proud of having an opportunity to use Skyscanner API and build a fun project.

What we learned

We learned to combine React and Flask and also learned a little bit about system design. We also learned to use Kafka as a messaging platform and to use MongoDB to store our user data.

What's next for Skyconnector

The design could be improved a lot. In addition, usability could be also improved. But after some more improvements, we believe that this service could be integrated with Skyscanner to provide the social aspect to flights.