Safe Travel Guide

Let us be your travel guide.
The main screen when searching for a city.
Having selected a city and the number of days, we will create an itinerary.
The main screen.
Paris itinerary with safe search off
Paris page with no day selected.
Paris itinerary with safe search on.

Inspiration

I love traveling. But when I arriving in a new city for a short amount of time, the number of things you can do is daunting. How do I decide what I can see, where to go, when should I leave? This website takes all the guess work out of the equation. Pick where you are going, what you are interested in, and any health concerns you may have, and we will create a carefully selected itinerary for your trip.

What it does

It looks through all the must see places in a city, and categorizes them according to interests and health concerns, then tries to organise them into a daily itinerary. It does that using a replaceable filter, that looks at each locations and tries to work out their fit. At the moment this is quite simple, but it could be complex, and us some AI and user feedback to rate different locations. It also looks up the entry requirements for that particular country, such as VISA and covid restrictions from Sherpa, to help you decide whether you can actually go there or not. And downloads safety information from Amadeus, that shows you how each city handles physical Harm, lgbtq, political Freedom, theft score and women. We also look up hotels from Amadeus that are nearby. We also use sitata data to look at recent events affecting that locaiton. It presents all this on one page, and lets you print out that page.

Travel Problem it solves

I think the website solves 2 problems:

Hygiene & Health: I try to solve this by only showing places that are safe for people to see, and easily create an itinerary for those places. I also leverage the amadeus API to show how safe the neighbourhood is before they travel somewhere.
Travel & Experiences: having an easy way to create an itinerary, makes it easy for people to plan their trip, and be inspired. It takes a lot of the problems of searching for what to see, and easy to share what they have planned with others. And one of the useful aspects of this project, is that the filter can be changed to suit any other health conditions. For example, people that are agoraphobic, we could add a new filter to create a guide to suit them. Even people only interested in art and museums.

How I built it

Using an API to gather all the must see locations for a particular city, we create an itinerary by rating the must see location, working out how long you would visit each one, and what other must see places are nearby. That way I could create a daily itinerary.

For people after a safe experience mindful of COVID-19, I created a filter that examines each location to see if it was an enclosed space with lots of crowds. This excludes places like museums, art galleries, palaces, etc. So I would not include them, and look for something else. The last thing I added was the ability to add a location if you really wanted to see it.

Then the page looks up API details on the safety of those locations, as well as entry information for those countries, as well as hotels nearby. I also use alert data from sitata to give you an indication of the latest news for this location.

Challenges I ran into

The filter I use to classify whether a place is safe or not is not that great, as you can imagine in such a short amount of time. There are so many ways to make this better.

The amadeus token runs out every 15 minutes or so, and takes a while to get from Australia. This made the page load even slower, so I made a separate routine to get that token every 15 minutes, and reuse it.

I had feedback from my mentor that it would be useful to run on a mobile device, so I added the ability to get your current location. This didn't work unless you serve the pages of HTTPS, so I had to get a SSL cert to run that.

I also had to spend a lot of time to get it to run on mobile and desktop. It still does not look that great on mobile.

Adding the ability to force add in places you really wanted to see was a last minute job.

I tried adding in a map, but was worried about google map requirements, and had difficulty getting openlayers to work.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Creating an app that is actually usable, and people have found useful already.

Getting it all to work using your location on a mobile phone, that required some extra calls due to the lack of data. Just having a GPS is not enough for some calls to Sherpa and Amadeus.

What I learned

Getting the data is easy, displaying it in a meaningful UI is hard. Creating a filter can be incredibly useful, and takes a lot of the work out of current guides in the market. This is a good USP.

What's next for Travel Guide

Making it even more mobile friendly, improving the experience, improving the UI, adding in a map. I need to improve the print feature so that it only includes things that are off interest. There are still a number of bugs in the website, which I would like to fix. I also need to improve the filter on what sort of places are safe or not. Currently it is just a general idea. Making a walking guide to go along with your chosen itinerary. There are a lot of things we could add to this app to make it more usable. Finding places to eat nearby your lunch and dinner must see spots. Adding in different filters for different health needs/personal wants.