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✈️ SKYMATE — Smarter Flight Price Tracking

🌟 Inspiration

Flight prices change ridiculously fast, and checking every airline manually was exhausting.
I wanted a smarter way to find the best deal without spending hours refreshing websites.
That’s why I built SKYMATE — a tool that tracks flight prices automatically and shows the cheapest option instantly.

⭐ What It Does

SKYMATE pulls the latest flight prices from airline websites and compares them across multiple carriers to help users find the best deal.
Currently, it supports four major domestic airlines.

🔑 Key Features

  • Smart price comparison: Instantly shows the cheapest airline for any supported route.
  • Route bookmarking: Save frequently–searched routes for quick access.
  • Price-drop alerts: Receive an email when prices fall below your selected threshold.
  • Historic price insights: Understand if a deal is actually good by comparing it with past trends.

🧩 How We Built It

We focused on making the experience simple and reliable:

  • A clean and fast frontend for users to search and track routes.
  • A strong backend that handles price tracking, comparisons, and alerts.
  • A secure database to store flight prices, bookmarks, and user preferences.

🚧 Challenges We Ran Into

Scraping airline websites was the toughest part — constant rate limits and blocks made it difficult to gather data reliably.

To solve this, we:

  • Made our scraper behave more like real users.
  • Added random delays and rotated browsing identities.
  • Optimized our scraping workflow, reducing total scrape time from 12 minutes to just 3 minutes.

This made the system fast, stable, and much more accurate.

🏆 Accomplishments We’re Proud Of

  • Built an end-to-end flight price tracker from scratch
  • Improved scraping speed by 4×
  • Designed a system that genuinely helps travelers save money
  • Solved real-world problems like rate-limiting and inconsistent data sources

📚 What We Learned

  • Real-world data extraction is challenging and airline sites change quickly.
  • Building reliable services requires adaptability and optimization under real constraints.
  • Improving user experience and performance is just as important as technical accuracy.

🚀 What’s Next for SKYMATE

  • Support for more airlines and international routes
  • SMS and WhatsApp alerts
  • An AI-powered model trained on our scraped data to predict deals
  • A browser extension for one-click price checking
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