Bestination. | Devpost

Landing page
Notify page

Inspiration

We wanted to go on a trip together as a team, but every time we looked at flights the prices were just too high and we'd scrap the idea entirely. Sometimes we'd spend ages scrolling through Skyscanner hunting for discounted deals, find something decent, and by the time we came back to book it the price had jumped or the deal had disappeared completely. We kept asking ourselves — why do we have to go hunting for deals? Why can't the deals just come to us? That's why we built Bestination — a real-time flight deal alert platform that finds the cheapest flights and notifies you instantly so you never miss a deal again. Find deals. Fly smarter. Fly cheaper.

What it does

Bestination monitors flight prices across airlines and scores every deal based on how cheap it actually is compared to what that route normally costs. You set your preferences once — where you want to fly from, your dream destinations, places you're open to, and your budget — and Bestination does the rest. When a flight drops significantly below its average price, you get an instant alert on WhatsApp or email with the price, the deal score, and a direct link to book. A £12 flight that normally costs £38 is a 68% drop — we score that as an Insane deal and it hits your phone immediately. You don't search for anything. The deals find you.

How we built it

We split our team of four into parallel workstreams to build a full-stack platform in under 24 hours. One person built the entire frontend using React with Vite and Tailwind CSS — the landing page, onboarding wizard, deal feed, and deal detail pages. Another set up Supabase for authentication, the Postgres database, row-level security, and realtime subscriptions, carefully designing the schema to handle unstructured API data. A third person integrated the Duffel API using Next.js to pull real-time flight pricing and load it into the database, handling edge cases around query formatting and data normalisation. The fourth person built the notification pipeline using Resend for email alerts and Twilio for WhatsApp notifications. Once someone finished their task they'd flex to help a teammate or pick up the next piece, keeping everyone productive throughout.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was the complex backend integration — making everything work together in real time meant handling a lot of edge cases to keep the system adaptive and responsive. We were integrating multiple APIs that each returned data in different formats, so we had to carefully design our Supabase schema to normalise and store everything cleanly while still supporting fast queries for the live deal feed. Building a complete full-stack platform with authentication, a real-time deal feed, flight API integration, and a dual notification system in under 24 hours was intense. There were moments where things broke and we had to debug under serious time pressure. On top of that, coordinating four people working on different parts simultaneously required disciplined Git practices to avoid conflicts and errors.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that we built a fully functional full-stack platform in less than a day — from a working authentication flow to a live deal feed with real flight data to WhatsApp notifications hitting your phone in real time. The moment we triggered a deal and a WhatsApp message actually appeared on a teammate's phone was the highlight of the whole hackathon. We're also proud of how well we worked as a team — splitting tasks intelligently, communicating clearly on Git, and flexing between roles when someone needed help. Most importantly, we built something we'd actually use ourselves.

What we learned

We learned that team coordination matters just as much as code — having structured communication, clear task ownership, and disciplined Git workflows prevented the chaos that can easily derail a hackathon team. We learned the importance of taking time upfront to find a strong problem statement and solution before writing any code, because that investment meant we never lost direction during the build. We learned that real-time systems are hard but worth it — making the deal feed and notifications genuinely live is what makes Bestination feel useful rather than just another static flight search tool. And we learned how to divide and conquer effectively, splitting into parallel workstreams and then helping each other once individual tasks were done.

What's next for Bestination.

We want to add price prediction using machine learning to forecast when prices will drop so users can book with confidence before deals even appear. We plan to expand beyond Europe to worldwide coverage with more airlines and destinations. We want to build a group trip mode that finds deals across multiple departure airports so friend groups can actually plan a trip together. And we'd love to create a browser extension that shows your Bestination deal score on any flight you're browsing on other sites — so even if you're on Skyscanner, you know whether that price is genuinely good or not.