SmartVacay | Devpost

Perfect Destination Form for the AI
Rotating Earth
Login UI
Post UI
Perfect Destination description, provided by the AI.
Card Component for viewer post

Inspiration

Often in our families, we found it difficult to agree upon one specific place to go for vacation. Either it was a place we had been too many times, or places that were too expensive, and simply, we didn't know about. We solved this problem through our app, SmartVacay.

What it does

SmartVacay utilizes a social media-like feed to enhance the user experience, giving them an opportunity to connect with those around them. Additionally, SmartVacay offers an AI-based tool that suggests the perfect destination for whoever is in dire need of it.

How we built it

We used React.js for the frontend of the app, Firebase for user authentication and database storage, and TailwindCSS for enhanced styling. Also, we used the OpenAI API to power our backend, Travel Advisor API for the collection of restaurants, hotels, and attractions, along with the Places Autocomplete API to give the user a better variety of places to choose from.

Challenges we ran into

The OpenAI API was very troublesome for us, as we ran into many 429 errors, among a plethora of other syntax errors. But, we got it to work in the end, through a thorough reading and understanding of the documentation. Also, TailwindCSS was a bit of a challenge for us, as we had never made this big of an application before, therefore managing this much code, along with a utility-based CSS framework was going to be hard. However, we persevered, and we put in work, leading to us to the end result, which is submitting a complete web app for MapHacks.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of completing our project, and all the goals that we had originally set out to do in the beginning. Often before hackathons, we don't really get out to finishing everything that we set out beforehand, which was true until today. Additionally, we're very proud of integrating several APIs together successfully, which may seem like a daunting task, but with the help of React.js, and organized documentations, it was possible

What we learned

We learned that we have to read more into the policies of APIs, as going into this hackathon, we assumed that OpenAI offered unlimited API access, which turned to be very, very false. This was the main reason our project got delayed in the first place, and why our UI was not as enhanced as we would have liked it to be.

What's next for SmartVacay

We plan to make the UI more responsive and implement a loading UI. We also plan to deploy our app, to make it accessible to anyone, anywhere. Additionally, we plan to make the perfect destination functionality have more features