BacPac

2 Itinerary overview screen
0 Main screen
5 Chat with backpackers screen
3 Itinerary detail screen
4 Match backpackers screen
1 Select itinerary screen
Logo

Inspiration

Having organised a couple of backpacking trips before, we know how tiring and frustrating the search for an itinerary can be. One has to stay within time and economical budgets, which usually leads to reiterations and wasted work. More and more young people are travelling on a budget today, which amounts to 20% of the global tourist market (valued more than 1 Trillion $). With full access to the booking API we saw an opportunity to automate the process and even more, look for optimal trip plans!

What it does

The app consists of two services. The first finds optimised itineraries given a geographical area, a budget and a range of dates. This automatically finds landmarks, budget hotels with good reviews in each, allocates time in each landmark based on popularity, considers travelling distance and cost to find the optimal order, and finally generates a comprehensive summary. The second service connects the user to backpackers that are looking for a similar experience. By joining others the user can considerably lower his/her expenses (the amount saved is also calculated).

How I built it

We accessed the Booking api using python to gather data on the hotels in the different landmarks to explore. These landmarks where handpicked so as to lower the development time, despite in the real product they would be automatically proposed. We also calculated the road distance between points and used it to estimate transport cost. Using all this data we implemented a Travelling Salesman Problem solver tailored to our optimisation criteria (cost and schedule). The complete concept of the app has been defined in artwork that reflects the results from our algorithm.

Challenges I ran into

Consistent handling of data across the software. Adapt an existing TSP solver.

What I learned

That this this idea could have saved us a lot of time and money, had it existed when we where planning our trips. We are therefore considering to continue developing it after the hackathon.