Flight Price Alert System Using Real Time Intelligence

Inspiration

It began with the thrill of planning a dream trip—only for ticket prices to shift by the time you’re ready to book. It’s like chasing a moving target, with prices changing every time you check. This sparked the idea for a solution that quietly tracks fares in the background, allowing travelers to relax and let the system do the work.

The project’s vision is to simplify travel planning, putting more focus on the journey itself rather than the price hunt. With this system, users receive timely alerts when a good deal appears, making it easier to catch spontaneous adventures and travel on a budget.

What it does

This system continuously monitors flight ticket prices on users' chosen routes, tracking fluctuations to identify the best times to book. Instead of requiring travelers to manually check and recheck fares, it works quietly in the background, gathering data and analyzing patterns in ticket pricing. When a favorable fare appears—whether it's a drop below a certain threshold or a rare deal—users receive instant alerts, allowing them to act quickly and secure tickets at the best price.

The system saves both time and money by doing the tedious work of price tracking and letting users know exactly when to book. Designed to ease the travel planning process, it allows users to set preferences, like specific routes and budget limits, so they only get alerts for deals that match their needs. By making airfare more accessible and affordable, this system turns the often unpredictable process of booking flights into a reliable and hassle-free experience.

How we built it

Technologies which are used to built the projects are:

• Azure SQL Database: Serves as the primary data storage solution, managing and storing structured flight price data for seamless integration and retrieval.
• Apache Kafka: Manages real-time data streaming, handling bulk flight price information from various sources efficiently and at scale.
• Node.js: Acts as the backend to facilitate communication between Azure SQL and Apache Kafka, ensuring smooth data flow and processing.
• Microsoft Fabric: Leverages real-time intelligence to process and analyze data, triggering alerts based on significant price fluctuations to notify users in real-time.

Key Features

• Real-Time Price Monitoring: Continuously tracks flight price changes across multiple sources, ensuring that users are alerted to price fluctuations as soon as they occur.
• Scalable Data Processing: Utilizes Apache Kafka for efficient real-time data streaming, handling large volumes of flight price data from diverse sources without delay.
• Automated Alerts: Leverages Microsoft Fabric’s real-time intelligence to detect significant price hikes or drops and triggers timely notifications to keep users informed of the best booking opportunities.

Challenges we ran into

• Limited Availability of Copilots in Microsoft Fabric: Only the F64 instance of Microsoft Fabric includes Copilots, while other instances such as F8, and F16 do not. This limitation prevented the incorporation of Copilots into the project as initially planned.
• Email Trigger Issue with Reflex: While using real-time intelligence to trigger email events, Reflex was employed; however, it did not produce the desired result of triggering the email. The test action functioned correctly, but the actual email trigger failed to execute as expected.
• Integration Challenges with Apache Kafka and Azure SQL: Encountered difficulties while integrating Apache Kafka with Azure SQL. The integration process faced technical hurdles, which impacted the seamless data flow between the two systems.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Although we are new to Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence, Power BI, and Apache Kafka, we successfully implemented the solution and achieved the desired results within a short timeframe.

What we learned

• We learned Microsoft Fabric streaming data
• We Integrated the Azure SQL with Apache Kafka to stream large volume of data
• We learned alerting system in Microsoft Fabric

What's next for Flight Price Alert System

As we move forward, our goal is to expand and enhance the system by building both the frontend and backend to create a fully integrated platform. The website will serve as a user-friendly interface, allowing travelers to easily register and receive personalized notifications based on their travel plans. We plan to streamline the user experience, making it seamless to access flight price alerts and manage preferences. By incorporating advanced features such as user account management, dynamic travel planning, and additional notification channels (email, SMS, app alerts), we aim to provide a comprehensive solution that empowers users to make informed, cost-effective travel decisions.

Built With

• apache-kafka
• javascript
• microsoft-fabric
• node.js
• sql