Smart Flights

Website Logo
Google Maps API Interface Display

Inspiration

When coming to the U.K. from the US for this hackathon, we found it surprisingly difficult to find cheap tickets. We theorized that if you could find the absolute cheapest flight from any city in the US to any city in Europe, you could connect with budget airlines for cheap.

What it does

Our website takes as input the user location, final destination, and their travel dates to find the main intercontinental flight. Currently, only North America and the EU are implemented.

How we built it

We wrote a program in Python and used Flask (Python Microframework) to interact with and feed data to the skyscanner API, as well as display the information using an integrated Google Maps API. Built simple website using HTML and CSS. This is how we get our price information and overall display.

Challenges we ran into

The greatest challenge was figuring out how to get the API to return the information we wanted and how to give it the information it needed to do that. We also had formatting issues with the website we built for the project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are most proud of creating the Python algorithm that drives this program. No other service does exactly what we do and we're excited to have done something new.

What we learned

We learned how to interface the API for the least amount of data possible and parse it for the desired results. Also learned better uses for Python, like how tuples worked, and how to interface skyscanner API.

What's next for Smart Flights

We hope to implement connecting flights within continents to give users the absolute cheapest price. We would also like to implement the rest of the world and polish up the website.