Tripidea

Inspiration

We wanted a simple way to plan trips , the perfect trips

What it does

Tripidea builds itineraries with smart stops (food, adventure, or mixed) and shows them on a map. It also has a stargazing feature that checks if a stop is good for night skies.

How we built it

React/Next.js frontend with Google Directions and other APIs

Challenges we ran into

API costs & rate limits: Balancing Google Directions/Places calls with quota—solved via corridor sampling, per-theme caps, and batched requests.

Latency spikes: Detour math required extra Directions calls; I windowed segments and parallelized with small batches.

Detour accuracy: Needed a fair comparison without full re-routing; used local segment (i→i+K) timing to estimate added minutes.

Export to Google Maps: place_id: waypoints weren’t always resolved in Maps UI; switched to lat,lng waypoints for reliability.

Ambiguous inputs: Free-text origin/destination sometimes ambiguous; added support for lat,lng and encouraged precise addresses.

Photos & data gaps: Some Places lack photos or reviews; added graceful fallbacks and consistent card layout.

Time & weather logic: Estimating ETA at nightfall for the stargaze stop and mapping it to Open-Meteo time steps (timezone/DST quirks).

Accomplishments we’re proud of

Working itinerary planner with select-to-add stops and a fun stargazing mode.

What we learned

How to combine APIs and keep the UI simple under time pressure.

What’s next for Tripidea

Add weather awareness, sharing with friends, and better stargazing data

Built With

• css
• html
• javascript
• node.js
• react
• typescript