IMPORTANT NOTES
We registered a Domains.com name for this site but due to DNS propagation it may not be available. The domain is transtravel.tech.
Inspirations
The idea came out of one team member's experience visiting a new country. They saw all the attractions that its cities had to offer, but what really stood out to them in the end was an opportunity they had to connect with locals. They encountered a volunteer event going on and were encouraged to do something outside their comfort zone: pass out water and snacks. It began as a frightening moment, but soon turned into an wholesome and unforgettable one, even with the language barrier. They witnessed the people's culture and met friendly faces, even learning a few new words in the language! TransTravel looks to replicate these same experiences elsewhere and transform what it means to travel.
What it does
TransTravel not only provides hotel recommendations, tourist attractions, and flight pricing to help you plan your next big trip, but also suggests incredible social volunteerism opportunities that you can take part in. With over 20 cities and dozens of attractions and volunteering nonprofits, we are sure to make your experience fulfilling and memorable. This helps you interact with locals, discover new cultures, and most importantly, help other people.
How we built it
The backend of our website is built around Node. We created our own API to gather data. Our API also made requests to other APIs to retrieve all the data we needed. For each city, we researched and compiled a list of their most famed attractions as well as available nonprofits. The frontend of our website incorporates multiple CSS libraries and packages (like Tailwind and Bulma) to create a visually appealing site. We use handlebars to handle creating different HTML elements depending on what is returned from the user input. To collaborate, we used VS Code Live Share and Github.
Challenges we ran into
Finding a suitable API was a big deal because it was hard to find an API (free) which was providing all the data which we needed. We had to get creative to do what we wanted. Linking the front end and back end was a challenge too because we ran into a hundred bugs while building the website, but we hopefully sorted that out within the time frame. Due to the time zone differences of each team member, we had some difficulty coordinating times when we can all work, but we managed to get the project done
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're very proud of ourselves for trying things that we have never tried before such as using Node and working with APIs. Much of our team consisted of beginners, so helping them learn was very insightful, but it was also a learning experience for those who have attended hackathons in the past, as we encountered unforeseen challenges in developing this website. Solving these challenges meant collaborating, and collaborating was another accomplishment from our view. Our team is spread out across 3-4 timezones, and some of us had to stay up late to work on the project. Everyone was very dedicated and committed to FreyHacks, which was awesome to see.
What we learned
Through the past two days, we learned significant technical skills in web development. We became more comfortable with utilizing API's and fetching them. Additionally, we learned Node.js to store our data and develop our back-end. Finally, we were learned how to link the front-end and the back-end to create a functioning website. Professionally, our group learned to collaborate with individuals with different skillsets around the world and to successfully create a project.
What's next for TransTravel
Here are some of our plans for the future to improve the project:
- Adding an expense field, allowing the user to input their budget preferences.
- Adding a flight seat checker which will fetch data from an API and display how many seats are available on a particular day on a particular flight.
- Expanding the list of cities.
- Adding links to book flights, hotels, etc. with real-time prices being shown.
- Integrating all the features into a mobile app.
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