Vacation Buddy

Inspiration

Planning a trip with multiple friends is hard to manage. Our motivation behind Vacation Buddy is to make memories and travel more with people you cared about. There are many apps that help you find travel partners but none that helps you to plan a trip with friends and family. Vacation Buddy integrates the social aspect together with social feed to post travel photos, videos, stories, or advice.

What it does

For our MVP we are planning to have: Users can initiate a trip that needs to be planned Users can add tasks for things that need to plan with a due date Users can assign individuals to tasks Yelp / TripAdvisor or similar third party API integration to assist in finding places to eat or excursions Logging of historic trips for future reference Map feature to plot trip events

How we built it

We built it using React js, Material-UI, and CSS3 for the frontend. For authentication, we are using Firebase authentication and Firebase database. Firebase helped us to leverage a REST API that serves all the requests to our frontend.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges that we faced were understanding and using React hooks. Since it is our first time using React hooks it was hard to make it work with Firebase but in the end, we made it work thanks to the persistence of our main developer You Song.

What we learned

We learned to work with firebase, firebase authentication, React hooks, React hooks useEffect, and Material-UI.

What's next for Vacation Buddy

Follow up reminders, either in-app or through some third-party service, when incomplete tasks are close to the due date View to see the proposed itinerary as events for the trip are confirmed Integration with google calendar Chat functionality to discuss plans For tasks that each person needs to do (i.e. book plane tickets or if the plan is to go sailing one day, purchase a ticket for a sailing cruise), confirmation that everyone completed the task Voting feature if there are disagreements on what to do during the trip The social aspect where users can have to add friends and view their friends' past trips for ideas Collecting photo / video / audio during the trip