Travelistic

Easily plan trips with friends. Vote on locations and get a clear daily itinerary showing meals, activities, travel times, and costs, so everyone can see the full plan at a glance.

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Inspiration:

Planning group trips can be chaotic and messages get lost in group chats, schedules clash, and plans often fall through because there’s no clear shared vision. We wanted to create a platform that centralizes planning, makes trips easier to visualize, and increases the chances that plans actually happen.

What it does:

Travelistic allows groups of friends to plan trips collaboratively. Members vote on the locations they want to visit, and the app generates a daily itinerary that includes:

  • Places to Eat(Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner)
  • Accurate Travel times between locations
  • Optimized order of activities
  • Estimated costs of activities to maintain a budget

The itinerary starts and ends at a central location (like a hotel), ensuring smooth, realistic planning. Even non-attendees can view the plan to explore trips without needing a travel agent or doing extensive research.

How we built it:

  • Frontend: Displays itineraries, locations, and voting options in a clean, user-friendly interface.
  • Backend: Flask API handles locations utilizing the API to assist itinerary generation.
  • Google Distance Matrix API: Calculates travel times between locations dynamically.
  • Logic: Schedules activities around meals, calculates travel durations, and outputs a structured JSON itinerary for the frontend.

Challenges we ran into:

  • This was our first time working with mobile development, so learning the tools and frameworks was challenging.
  • We struggled with connecting the frontend and backend to communicate properly.
  • Merging branches and coordinating work across the team caused some initial issues.
  • Figuring out realistic travel times and scheduling around meals and activities was tricky.
  • Despite these hurdles, we were able to overcome them and get the app functioning smoothly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

  • Creating a fully automated itinerary generation from group votes
  • Integration of realistic travel times with Google Maps API
  • Clear visual output showing meals, activities, travel, and costs
  • Ensuring the itinerary is useful for both attendees and non-attendees

What we learned:

  • Planning trips programmatically is more complex than it seems—scheduling meals, activities, and travel requires careful logic.
  • Collaborative decision-making can be integrated effectively with voting systems.
  • Structured visual itineraries improve clarity and participation, reducing planning stress.

What's next for Travelistic:

  • Add support for multi-day trips with flexible start/end times
  • Allow custom meal locations and activity priorities
  • Enable sharing itineraries externally via links or PDFs
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