As a team of four with Xiao, Li, and Shen, we had a great time in Junction Hackathon 2015, Helsinki.

Xplanner

We deliver a product prototype, Xplanner, which is an automatic trip planner that finds you flight tickets, hotels, attractions, restaurants and oragnizes everything into a consistent time line.

Motivations

  • Holiday! You happen to have about two weeks’ free time and you want to take a holiday to the following three cities.

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  • Tickets? First thing you need to do is to search for flight tickets. You want to find the most cost-efficient flight tickets but the question is which city you want to fly first. If you want three cities then you have six options ($$3\times2\times1=6$$). Oh, you still need to know which day you want to fly. To find good tickets, you need to do a lot of search.

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  • Hotels? The next thing you need to do is to find hotels for each destination.

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  • Attractions? Holiday quite often means sight-seeing. So you need to find a collection of tourist attractions for different cities in order to make yourself a tourist.

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  • Restaurants? Things get more complicated if you are a food-lover or you like beers. I do. Good restaurants are quite indispensable for different cities as well.

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  • Buddies? If you are traveling alone, you probably want to find a buddy to travel together.

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Product - Xplanner

After 10 hours hard coding, we eventually announced our prototype Xplanner with permanent URL tripassistant.herokuapp.com.

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Technologies behind the scene

  • Github
  • Heroku web service
  • Python flask
  • APIs
    1. Finnair API
    2. Foursquare API
    3. whatever API
  • Algorithms to find the cost-efficient flights