TravelBuddy

Inspiration

The idea began as Tinder for Countries where users would be able to like/swipe on travel destinations that they like to be able to identify future vacation/travel destinations. However, to simplify the code to be suitable for a HackAThon the idea was modified to be based on a quiz format. This project aims to help those people who would like to travel the world and gain new experiences but have yet to try due to lack of information, financial burden of travel advisors, stress of researching destinations, etc. By providing a free service that provides the beginnings of an itinerary and a destinations that fits the users needs, travel can become increasingly accessible and equitable to all people.

What it does

Takes in user input via a web-based quiz then provides various travel destinations that the user would likely enjoy. Includes popular attractions, foods, travel, and an estimated budget per person.

How we built it

It was built largely with ReactJS framework but also includes APIs from Google Maps for imbedding maps at each location, OpenAI for matching user input to destinations, and other tools. Team members collaborated both in person and through liveshare on VSCode.

Challenges we ran into

We realized that using OpenAI's API could be relatively expensive. Thus, we worked around this by loading in various examples and then sadly having to disable the API key to conserve resources.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Overall, every member of the team learned valuable skills in computing and we also spent a lot of good quality time with one another and bonded well as a team.

What we learned

The majority of the team had little experience with developer tools and languages that they became more comfortable with over the course of the HackAThon like Git Version Control, CSS, HTML, ReactJS, API usage, etc. It was also the first true hackathon for the team which was a novel and enjoyable experience.

What's next for TravelBuddy

Improving the user interface and broadening the travel options database. Additionally, the quiz could be fine tuned to more accurately train the AI on appropriate travel destinations for each response. There are also a variety of other features that we believe would further benefit the project by increasing connectivity and ease of use - photo sharing features or the attractions, data on weather forecasts, best flight/travel options, etc - that could make TravelBuddy a "one-stop-shop" for travel related information.

Built With

• css
• google-maps
• jsx
• openai
• react