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Inspiration

As the older sibling, I've experienced the stress of juggling dozens of travel tabs—comparing flight times, reading endless hotel reviews, and Googling “top things to do” in every city.

I’m sure many of you can relate! That stressful, fragmented process inspired me to build YOUtinerary: a streamlined, AI-powered platform that tackles the hardest parts of travel planning, letting you focus on the fun of discovering new places rather than the tedium of logistics. With YOUtinerary handling the details, you can simply enjoy the excitement of your next adventure!

What it does

YOUtinerary is an AI-driven travel planner that automatically creates a personalized day-by-day itinerary for any trip. Users simply input details like destination, start and end dates, budget, pace, and interests, and YOUtinerary generates suggested activities and routes. Through a drag-and-drop interface, travelers can reorder or remove activities, then visualize everything on an interactive map—no juggling multiple tabs or spreadsheets required. Whether you’re a solo backpacker or a family of four, YOUtinerary streamlines planning so you can spend less time organizing and more time exploring.

How we built it

We built YOUtinerary with a React + Vite frontend for a fast, modern user interface, and a Node.js + Express backend to handle AI requests and manage routes. For real-time data and authentication, we integrated Firebase Firestore and Firebase Auth, ensuring user data stays synchronized and secure. On the AI side, we used OpenAI to generate recommended activities and itineraries, and @react-google-maps/api to plot destinations on an interactive map. Finally, we incorporated react-beautiful-dnd to let users drag and drop activities between days, making the trip-planning process feel simple and intuitive.

Challenges we ran into

We’re first-year CS students, and YOUtinerary is our very first full-stack project. Honestly, we spent a surprising amount of time just figuring out how to pull, push, and merge on GitHub, with conflicts popping up left and right. We had to rely on each other’s patience to keep things under control. Even though it was stressful, figuring out all those merges taught us a ton about working together, and now we feel a lot more confident about building bigger and better projects in the future.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to build a fully functioning full-stack web app—our first one ever—complete with AI itinerary generation, drag-and-drop editing, and real-time map integration. We tackled authentication, overcame GitHub merge conflicts, and even learned to secure our API keys and user data. Seeing our first test user plan a trip without drowning in 20 browser tabs felt like a huge win and reminded us why we started this project in the first place.

What we learned

We discovered just how powerful—and sometimes tricky—combining different tools can be. From wrangling real-time data in Firebase to learning the ins and outs of AI prompt engineering with OpenAI, each new piece of the puzzle challenged our understanding of web development. We also got hands-on experience handling version control conflicts on GitHub (a crash course in merges and rebases!). Most importantly, we learned the value of clear communication and teamwork—two things that kept us going when code bugs and merge conflicts threatened to derail the project.

What's next for YOUtinerary

Flight & Travel Ticket Integration: We plan to incorporate direct flight and transport bookings, allowing users to compare options and finalize travel arrangements without leaving YOUtinerary.
Timed Itineraries: We want to add time slots for each activity, ensuring travelers know exactly when to be at each destination and how long they can spend there.
Collaborative Planning: We also want to let friends and family build itineraries together in real time—commenting, voting on activities, and seeing everyone’s changes instantly.