Smarter Travel

Inspiration

Typically a flight travel has three steps: from home to departure airport, actual flying, from arrival airport to actual destination. We aim at shortening this process into one step: from home to destination. So we think of providing Uber service option and prompt users to input their source and destination address right when they are booking flight tickets. Then, users won't need to concern anything else. We push Uber service notification certain time before users need to leave to departure airport, ensuring they won't be late. Then when users arrive at the arrival airport, Uber service notification will automatically appear to provide cars we have found already, and once it is accepted, then users can save waiting time a lot.

It makes peoples' travel life easier, smarter, lighter and saves a lot of time for everyone at everywhere!

Upon our idea's basic scenarios, another potential typical use case will be splitting fare with strangers, which would be possible when a group of conference attendees arrive the airport, and they all need to directly travel from arrival airport to the actual conference place, so that same Uber notifications can be generated with also split fare option.

What it does

Right after accepting Uber service when booking flight tickets, you will automatically receive Uber notification when you are leaving to/from airport.
No need to add Uber reminder manually, Uber notification pops up automatically at the most suitable time for you.
No need to choose start point and destination manually using Uber, once typing them when booking tickets, we will auto-fill it in Uber app start point box and destination box.
Saving your waiting time, we call cars ahead for you.

How I built it

FlightStats is the only API we found possibly useful for us to retrieve flight status, but we could't find valid API key from website(pending always), so we have to simulate the whole process of our idea, in order to demonstrate using Uber time estimation API combined with flight actual arrival time and departure time, we can provide a smarter recommendation for users. Thus, they don't have to worry about when they need to book a car from set-off place to departure airport, neither worry about how they need to travel from arrival airport to actual destination.

Challenges I ran into

In fact we have thought of pre-booking Uber service at first, which will be an extra transportation option when you are booking your flight, but however, it is somehow relying on pre-booking taxi service, not covered by uber's on-demand service. That's why we turn to recommendation notification service for Finnair plus Uber, right on time when you are thinking about how to get to the departure airport from your home, and also how to get to your actual destination from the arrival airport.