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Tourista

Authors: Javier Huang, Darren Chu, David Jiang

Inspiration

The feeling and stress of being lost in an unfamiliar location is commonly shared among many individuals travelling to different countries and locations. Finding reliable information on a particular location that is unfamiliar often requires a lot of research and valuable time. Even attending Hack The North is considered travelling, and planning different aspects of the trip can be daunting. We created Tourista in hopes of facilitating the planning and organization process of travelling. By creating this app, we hope that it would make travelling more accessible to all and reduce the unnecessary stress that comes with travel planning.

What it does

Tourista searches for popular attractions, restaurants, and accommodations in the location specified by the user and displays it in a simplistic yet effective manner. The app also has features such as estimating the time needed to travel to various destinations through many different forms of travel, such as driving, biking, walking, and public transit. Additionally, the app allows the user to visualize their itinerary and discover popular landmarks that they may not have heard of otherwise. By making travelling more accessible to all, Tourista has the potential to provide experiences for individuals and allow them to see the world in a broader horizon, introducing them to different customs and cultures in the process.

How we built it

Tourista was built using advanced software, namely SvelteKit, the Cohere API, and the Google Maps API. SvelteKit is web development framework that can be used to create user interfaces that greatly impact the user experience in a positive way. The app that we built using SvelteKit is organized and effective, despite being minimalistic in design. We used Cohere's cutting-edge large language model (LLM) API to fetch information regarding different locations and landmarks, which provided a reliable way to obtain information given the requests of our users. Lastly, the Google Maps API was used in both providing a visual aid for the user in their travels, and estimating travel times based on the distance between locations. Our team used a VSCode Liveshare to collaborate on the project, while brainstorming ideas and providing feedback for our project.

Challenges we ran into

One of the challenges that we ran into presented itself at the start of our Hackathon journey. Given many different powerful APIs to choose from, the possibilities in terms of the projects that we could create were endless. Deciding on which tools to use to bring our idea of a more accessible travel planning app to its full potential used up many hours of brainstorming. Another big challenge we ran into was the incorporation of APIs into our project, specifically, the Google Maps API. As the Google Maps API is very complex and powerful, we were quite overwhelmed at the beginning and needed quite a significant amount of time to figure out how to effectively utilize the API in Tourista.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The area that we are most proud of in creating Tourista is the user experience that it provides. With the development of a clean, organized, yet detailed user interface, Tourista makes travel planning much less stressful and easy. Although many of the animations and designs that we had on our website took a long time to program, the end product was extremely satisfying and looked much better than we could have ever hoped. Another accomplishment that we are proud of is that we figured out how to use and incorporate the powerful and complex APIs into our project. Although they were difficult at first, the use of these APIs allowed the potential for Tourista to skyrocket.

What we learned

In collaborating on this project, we learned how to approach a large-scaled problem by breaking it down into smaller tasks. At first, we experimented with the APIs and made smaller components to our websites to test out the features and the potential of these tools. After we were more comfortable in tackling large problems and ambitions, we started to use these APIs in a more effective way and create an app that is very sophisticated and powerful.

What's next for Tourista

Approaching the end of the development for the project, we had many more ideas that we would have tried to implement given that there was more time. We wanted to make Tourista more effective and reliable, as well as further improve the user experience. One such improvement is the addition of a recommendation system that suggests landmarks to users based on their ratings, popularity, and prices.