Inspiration
Our team comes from 5 different countries, and all of us together have visited more than 100 different countries. We love to travel. And we wanted to create something that would help us to share our passion with other people and inspire them to travel more. Uncover new opportunities, challenging experiences and great stories. Make it more easy for people to decide where to go and just do it, also share these places and adventures with others.
What it does
It beautifully visualizes the perfect travel experiences for you! It gathers information from your social media profile and creates smart recommendations for the most amazing places to visit. It focuses on the individual, presenting the best places and most exciting trips tailored for the user. Once you find a destination you are excited about you can either book it straight away, add the destination to the bucket list and even share it on Facebook to find friends to share the adventure with.
How we built it
The solution is built on top of a broad variety of technology. We integrated open data sources, the Finnair API and beautiful visualizations. The backend is built with NodeJS and is hosted on Bluemix. It integrates the various data sources and creates personalized predictions based on social media profiles such as Facebook. The frontend is built using React, it seamlessly integrates the user experience with the Finnair booking system.
For people frequently using social media, they can easily login and we will directly provide personalized recommendations based on all the connected data to the profile (Facebook and the services connected to the account such as Spotify, Eventbrite, Instagram, and many more).
Since not everyone is an avid Facebook user, we also provide a way to easily indicate interests through a visually appealing and intuitive interface. By selecting categories, we can provide a well scoped list of recommendations for these customers as well. Our cloud based technology stack allows us to easily integrate additional data sources and analytics solutions.
Challenges we ran into
The feature gap between the Finnair website and the available APIs. Integrating back end with front end. A lot of interesting git conflicts that became learning experiences.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
A quick pivot to node.js based backend from spring after learning that the latter is difficult to integrate with our react based front end.
What we learned
Finding the right name for your project is challenging! Also, spending time on planning app architecture, backend and frontend integration before jumping to code is a good idea. Don’t use Java.
What's next for WonderWall
Bring the machine learning based recommendation system to the next level. Integrating with additional data sources like TripAdvisor, Instagram and the fully featured Amadeus API.
Built With
- css
- finnair-api
- google-maps
- html5
- javascript
- node.js
- react.js
- redux
- social-media-integration
- travel-booking-engine
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