TravelBook

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TravelBook is a travel collaboration tool that allows you to easier plan and manage solo or group travel.

The Inspiration

Over the past year the travel industry has been severely impacted with various global events such as COVID-19. Revenue in the U.S. travel industry has severally dropped down about 39% and is heading towards an estimated 156 billion to 111 billion in Q3 2020 (1). This has caused disastrous results for many economies that heavily utilize the travel as a primary source of income as airlines, resorts and restaurants face the brunt of the flames and are either closed or running as little as 10% of their normal capacity (2). However, as the situation improves and people being to go back to pre-2020 levels there is a risk of decreased travel over fear. That's where we come in. Our goal at Travel Buddies is to make solo or group travel as seamless, safe and spectacular as ever.

How it works

Here's the concept.

Let's make planning less stressful. Our platform allows you to create or join a travel plan solo or with your team. Work with live travel data to find exactly what works for everyone and share it to the group so everyone can make their plans accordingly. This allows you to not only prevent travel accidents like booking the wrong date or time but allows for proper notification when a change is made.
Let's make safety a priority. Businesses that you plan to interact with can put the latest updates, policy changes or general reminders regarding their establishment directly to you before or after you interact with them so you're always in the know and get the information directly from the source. No more checking a dozen websites or wasting time calling numbers.
Let's be aware of our impact Every car, bus or plane you take most likely will impact the places you travel to or from in some form. This could be climate change, pollution or traffic. It's always a good idea to be aware of the impact you are making and to work to offset that impact if possible. That's why we want to make sure you are aware of the ways you can impact the environment and those you interact along your journey and offer you with the knowledge and opportunity to help them along the way.

How We Built It

For our prototype we will be building a VueJS powered front end, NodeJS backend and REST API mediator to send data. We will be storing data in MongoDB using the mongoose/node library. For our flight/hotel and travel data we will be using various Amadeus Api services such as: • Flight Offers Search • Flight Offers Price • Flight Choice Prediction • Airport and City Search • Hotel Search • Hotel Rating • Hotel Booking • Safe Place API All of this will be hosted on Google App engine.

Challenges We Ran Into

Time is huge problem. Especially since there is only two of us and each end of the project requires a lot of planning and work. API's are a pain too. We spent a great deal of time at the beginning just figuring out what core features we wanted to implement and the scale at which we were trying to build was definitely a bit much. As we worked on each feature and more time was taken up we realized we needed to more time to build this out. The backend worked rather well however we need to improve integration.

What We Accomplished

We did build a vueJS prototype however we had many issues with databases and data storage it works but we don't feel it's worth deploying. All of these problems can be sorted out with more time. We did however successfully use Amadeus API to gather trip information for planning so we definitely made progress.

Lessons Learned

We might have thought a bit big for only two of us. We definitely enjoyed the idea but there is much work to be done in order to rebuild this and show its usefulness. The concept of a single platform to manage all aspects of personal and group booking is no easy task but i will say that i have not yet given up for future redevelopment.

The Next Steps For TravelBuddies

We need to strip it down and design and plan from the bottom. One of the things the hackathon takes away is the ability to plan out with all the changes that need to be made (We also only joined on friday so we didn't have the advantage of time. I need to build a flow chart of the services and flow chart of the api structure. It's gonna be some work

We will definitely be continuing this project.

Code has been attached for front end as well.