Wander

Our welcome screen
Set the location of your next trip
Plan the length of your next trip
Choose your preferred transportation
Set your budget
Loading animation while generating destination suggestions based on your preferences
Destination example
Destination example
Destination example
View your personalized itinerary!
Set a custom itinerary for each day of your trip

Inspiration

Travel planning is a pain. Even after you find the places you want to visit, you still need to find out when they're open, how far away they are from one another, and work within your budget. With Wander, automatically create an itinerary based on your preferences – just pick where you want to go, and we'll handle the rest for you.

What it does

Wander shows you the top destinations, events, and eats wherever your travels take you, with your preferences, budget, and transportation in mind. For each day of your trip, Wander creates a schedule for you with a selection of places to visit, lunch, and dinner. It plans around your meals, open hours, event times, and destination proximity to make each day run as smoothly as possible.

How we built it

We built the backend on Node.js and Express which uses the Foursquare API to find relevant food and travel destinations and schedules the itinerary based on the event type, calculated distances, and open hours. The native iOS client is built in Swift.

Challenges we ran into

We had a hard time finding all the event data that we wanted in one place. In addition, we found it challenging to sync the information between the backend and the client.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re really proud of our mascot, Little Bloop, and the overall design of our app – we worked hard to make the user experience as smooth as possible. We’re also proud of the way our team worked together (even in the early hours of the morning!), and we really believe that Wander can change the way we travel.

What we learned

It was surprising to discover that there were so many ways to build off of our original idea for Wander and make it more useful for travelers. After laying the technical foundation for Wander, we kept brainstorming new ways that we could make the itinerary scheduler even more useful, and thinking of more that we could account for – for instance, how open hours of venues could affect the itinerary. We also learned a lot about the importance of design and finding the best user flow in the context of traveling and being mobile.

What's next for Wander

We would love to continue working on Wander, iterating on the user flow to craft the friendliest end experience while optimizing the algorithms for creating itineraries and generating better destination suggestions.