PoolAir

Inspiration

We came up with the inspiration for our project while searching for flight tickets to get from Zurich to New York and realized that it was cheaper to buy the exact same tickets from the Finnish version of the Skyscanner website. It turns out that the online travel agencies (OTAs) choose to price their tickets according to the geographical market. This means there are price discrepancies for the same flight tickets.

What it does

With PoolAir users can query and visualize the cheapest flights from Skyscanner without having to check manually over all geographical markets. Basically, we traverse the list of prices for all the flights for all the markets and display only the top cheapest ones.

How we built it

We built PoolAir mainly in Python, Flask and using web technologies. We made extensive use of the Skyscanner API.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge that we faced was the communication between the frontend and backend. Performing a query on the Skyscanner API takes a lot of time so we had to find a way to stream the results such that they continuously appear to the users. We also struggled a lot in understanding how multiprocessing is done in Python in order to parallelize the queries and make the computations faster.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we've built a fully functional prototype which can already help people save money on their flights.

What we learned

During this hackathon we learned a lot about web development using Python and HTML/JS and also got experience developing an API backend server using Flask.