RoamBuddy

Tripadvisor meets AI and Facebook making travel easy and personal!

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Inspiration

Global Travel is at a high with a $1.9B market size in 2023. This number is only expected to go up. The market share of tourism in the overall global economy is projected to reach 10% by 2025, highlighting its pivotal role in various countries' economic landscapes. Travel has two main problems:

  • It is stressful
  • People hate planning and making itineraries

Come to think of it, have you ever used a travel social media app? Do you never feel you had something that made your itinerary but also personalized it for you? What if you had something that gave you features of TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Facebook?

What it does

As you open RoamBuddy, you see your travel diary: A world map of where you have been. RoamBuddy helps track all your trips and share them easily with your friends. Want to plan a trip but don't want to work hard? Use our platform to get personalized and detailed itineraries based on your budget, country and timeline. We leverage AI to recommend trips based on what your friends are doing because great minds generally think alike. We also use the top reviews from Google and in the future, TripAdvisor and Yelp to suggest restaurants, sightseeing, and experiences. Just click on Add to Itinerary and let our app whip up an easy itinerary for you!

How we built it

Below are the steps for our process:

  1. Ideation: Deciding which project to make. Then figuring out the nuances of the said project and what we wanted.
  2. Back End: Deciding on using Node.js as our backend. We leveraged the Gemini API to give us food, travel, and sightseeing recommendations based on Google reviews (will later change for friends, Yelp, and Expedia reviews) and personalized prompts according to user preferences. We then prompted Gemini to properly design an itinerary based on preferences.
  3. Frontend: We used React to develop our frontend. We connected the front end to back end using API calls.
  4. Pain: Ran into way too many roadblocks and had to change product specs multiple times due to limited time/resources.
  5. Submission: Tested the product, recorded a demo, and submitted our product.

Challenges we ran into

Unfortunately, no team is perfect and so wasn't ours. Here are a few of our challenges:

  • Apart from Jatin, we were all 'Coding noobs' and although we had abundant Data Science/ML experience, our experience with Software Development was low. Hence actually building this web app was difficult.
  • We aren't used to working with each other and hence, getting started and overall communication was pretty tedious in the beginning.
  • Integrating an actual social media element into our app seemed impossible now because we lacked the time and the data necessary to do so. The idea would be to start with a small friend group to initiate data.

What we learned

Collectively, our team learned so much more than we expected initially. Our goals initially were simple: learn a lot and build a product that can help people. We slowly realized that we needed to start playing to our strengths. For Shrishti and Jatin that was the back end, for Lucy that was the front end and for Utkarsh it was being an overall manager and ideator. We also learned how to find information on the web better, be it for code, competitors, or market research. Finally, our biggest learning was handling our emotions. It is normal for people to let their feelings get over building the product and we had to make sure we do not do anything like that.

What's next for RoamBuddy

Next up, we aim to fully integrate the idea of social media on our app to be able to see what friends are saying and also where they have been. One can also view random travellers' profiles, follow them and message them to connect! We want to incorporate reviews for places from Expedia, TripAdvisor and Yelp.

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