The American Airlines Employee Travel Buddy

Inspiration

In our initial phase, we planned to develop a dashboard showcasing real-time counts of available standby seats across flights, aiming to enhance planning for American Airlines employees. However, insightful feedback from an interview with an American Airlines staff member revealed that such a system was already in place. This valuable discovery led us to pivot and enrich our original concept.

We evolved our project to offer a more dynamic and innovative tool, one that goes beyond current offerings and addresses unmet needs. Our enhanced solution now leverages historical data to predict future standby seat availability, offering a forward-looking perspective that empowers employees with advanced planning capabilities. This predictive feature, combined with our shortest path helper, positions our application as a unique and indispensable resource for American Airlines employees, enabling them to navigate the complexities of standby travel with greater ease and confidence.

The airline industry faces the challenge of managing standby seat availability for airline employees who wish to travel on flights. Standby travel allows airline employees to travel for free or discounted prices when a flight is originally fully booked but available seats open up. The number of these available standby seats is not known until the day of the flight, which makes traveling difficult for employees looking to travel via standby seats.

What it does

Standby Prediction Currently, when employees plan their trips, they only have access to the real-time count of available standby seats for their chosen flights. This number can fluctuate significantly from the planning stage to the actual day of travel. Our application addresses this uncertainty by analyzing historical data on standby seat availability. It then provides predictions on how many standby seats are likely to be available for any given flight in the future. This feature empowers employees to make more informed decisions when planning their trips, offering a clearer picture of what to expect.

Shortest Path Helper - Traveling on standby can be unpredictable for employees, often leading to situations where they arrive for a flight only to discover it's fully booked. Our application alleviates this stress by scanning available flights and calculating alternative routes. It helps employees find the most efficient way to reach their destination, even when their original plans fall through. This tool is designed to make standby travel more manageable and less stressful, ensuring employees have access to the best possible travel options at their fingertips.

Challenges we ran into

We spent too much time researching how to build it that we pretty much ran out of time to implement the python scripts we wrote into the frontend. We build models for standby prediction and implemented algorithms to find the shortest path home for employees when the obvious path isn't present. However, we ran out of time and couldn't connect them to our frontend. Our project is now frontend based and shows what we could've implemented if we had more time.