destinex. | Devpost

Why

793 - that's the number of SBB destinations. 24 hours - that's the maximum amount of time we have for our city trip. How to find the best one within few seconds when online we have so many information and we don't know what to choose? How to avoid annoying sightseeing planning and get surprised by a place you discover?

How

destinex. is a travel guide 2.0 platform which based on users´s preferences finds the most appropriate destination at the best price. AI Bot, which is a personalized city guide keeps user posted just before the journey, informing about weather details, and helping to discover city by trips. A smooth, enjoyable and unforgettable journey experience.

What

First we got possible destinations from nominatim.openstreetmap.org. With this information we created a Python backend to crawl possible destinations for different budgets leveraging the data from the SBB API. Further we added the business logic to get the prices and savings for the tickets from the SBB API. We made this functions available by building a Flask REST API. For faster prototyping and development, we made use of Gitlab-CI/CD to build docker container and run our development backend in docker. The frontend was built using flutter and dialogflow.

Challenges I ran into

Slow SBB API to collect the necessary data for journey decisions according to our budget. Trouble with train connection that did not provide valid price results.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Building a diverse team with different skills, experience and background. From technical perspective, building REST API on top of SBB API, connecting different data sets together and providing access to it with a mobile app including a chat bot.

What I learned

We learned that it is crucial to discover a pain and try to provide an easy and user friendly solution, constantly asking others for feedback. We went out of our comfort zone and asked people from Zurich to mention their thoughts about our idea. Their valuable feedback showed us, that the best solution is the easy one, giving clients unexpected experience.

Next steps

Chatbot will be combined with Google Maps, helping to find destinations. It will also announce challenges during the trip itself. After completing challenges, the user can decide to go to the next level and visit another city or stay where he is. Our next milestone is to create Discovering city 3.0 Platform- new level with augmented reality. Keep waiting!