Budget Vacations

Vacations on a Budget

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Inspiration

Most of the travel websites help in planning the flights/restaurants/rentals, but don't take into account the cost of visiting the locations and attractions in that city.

What it does

Budget Vacations takes care of that. We take into account the number of days and budget of a user and generate a schedule based on those constraints. Furthermore, we let them filter out the data based on their preferences, such as, day/night based activities or indoors/outdoors activities.

How we built it

We split the app into 2 distinct parts - frontend and backend that were implemented on different systems. The communication between the 2 parts takes place via distinct API calls.

Challenges we ran into

Creating and linking databases is harder than it looks. Blaze is catastrophic to a frontend developer's sanity. Last minute pushes to Heroku weren't appreciated by NPM :(

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Created an API that can be used to create an app on any platform - Web/iOS/Android. Implemented front-end using Meteor.js and Bootstrap as a proof-of-concept for the API Utilized NLP to extract features from the titles and description to classify the nature of each attraction into two of four categories: day or night and indoors or outdoors.

What we learned

Picking up a new framework (Django) in short time is hard :( Don't underestimate sanity checks on user input.

What's next for Budget Vacations

Add more cities. Add more filters. Learn what kind of schedules users like to provide a better service. Add Groupon integration. Recommend restaurants based on the schedule.

Backend Frontend

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