AUTREL

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Inspiration

Travel often leads people to the same popular destinations, while countless beautiful and culturally rich places remain overlooked. We wanted to create a different way to explore India — one that makes discovering lesser-known places feel exciting and rewarding.

This led to AUTREL, a gamified travel-discovery platform built around the idea:

Take the road less travelled.

Instead of simply listing destinations, AUTREL turns discovery into an adventure. Users can discover hidden gems, take on quests, complete missions, earn XP and Travel Coins, unlock badges, and track their exploration journey.

What We Built

We developed a working MVP of AUTREL with a focus on Tamil Nadu as the initial region.

The platform includes:

Destination discovery with categories such as Nature, Culture & Heritage, Food and Adventure
Search and filtering based on difficulty, budget and duration
A recommendation engine using a 5-factor weighted scoring system
Quest and mission-based exploration
Photo proof for completing missions
XP, levels and Travel Coins
Badges and exploration progress
Streak-based progression
A personal "My Journey" section
Local-first data persistence

The core experience follows:

DISCOVER → QUEST → EXPLORE → PROVE → EARN → UNLOCK → EXPLORE MORE

How We Built It

The original prototype was developed using React Native, Expo and TypeScript. We then developed a web-based MVP using React, TypeScript and Vite, keeping the architecture modular so that a backend can be introduced in future versions.

The recommendation system is based on our original scoring approach, giving different weights to:

Category — 40%
Difficulty — 15%
Budget — 15%
Duration — 15%
Hidden Gem Score — 15%

For the current MVP, user progress is stored locally rather than relying on a backend.

What We Learned

Building AUTREL helped us understand that creating a product is more than designing an interface. We had to think about user journeys, recommendation logic, gamification, data structures, persistence, responsive design and how individual features come together into one coherent experience.

We also learned the importance of starting small. Rather than attempting to map all of India immediately, we chose Tamil Nadu as our initial test region and built the foundation that can eventually scale.

Challenges

One of our biggest challenges was balancing travel discovery with gamification. We wanted the experience to feel engaging and game-like without allowing the game mechanics to overshadow the actual travel information.

Another challenge was designing a recommendation system that remained transparent and controllable instead of simply relying on generic AI-generated recommendations.

AUTREL is currently an MVP, and our next steps include user validation, expanding the destination database, introducing community contributions and eventually adding a backend for accounts, synchronization and scalable content management.