Project: Travel Website - TourTheUS

Inspiration

In today's fast-paced world, planning travel can be a challenging task for many. From deciding on destinations to booking flights and hotels, the process can be time-consuming and overwhelming. According to a survey by the U.S. Travel Association, more than half of Americans (54%) and 66% of leisure travelers agree that ‘taking time off to travel is more important than ever’, citing the abundance of options and lack of personalized recommendations as major hurdles. Our project aims to alleviate these challenges by providing a seamless and intuitive platform for travelers to plan their trips.

What It Does

Our website revolutionizes the travel planning process by allowing users to input their current state and their destination state. Upon submission, the app displays an interactive map of the U.S., zooming into the visiting state. It then display the travel plan generated by AI that offers personalized travel suggestions, including interesting places to visit within the state.

How We Built It

We developed our website using HTML and CSS for the frontend, ensuring a user-friendly interface. The backend is powered by Google API, with the retrieval of flight and hotel data. The heart of our platform is the ChatGPT AI, which interacts with users to provide travel suggestions based on their preferences.

Challenges We Ran Into

One of the most significant challenges we encountered was integrating the ChatGPT into our website. Ensuring that the chatbot could actively engage with users and provide relevant, accurate travel suggestions required extensive testing and troubleshooting. Additionally, syncing the chatbot's responses with the Google API data to offer a cohesive travel planning tool was a complex task that pushed our team's technical capabilities. Within the time limit, we could not get the Google API part done with the hotel and flights, but we did successfully hosting the web.

Accomplishments We're Proud Of

Our team takes immense pride in the user interface of our website, which combines aesthetics with functionality. We are also proud of the accuracy and relevance of the travel suggestions provided by AI.

What We Learned

This project taught us the importance of effective team collaboration and the distribution of tasks based on individual strengths and expertise. We learned that developing a large-scale project within a tight deadline is challenging but achievable with proper planning. Additionally, we gained valuable experience in integrating various technologies.

Possible Ideas and Updates for Our Travel Website

Looking forward, we plan to enhance our website by incorporating more personalized travel recommendations and expanding our database to include international destinations. We also aim to integrate real-time weather and local event information to provide users with a comprehensive travel planning resource. Continuous improvement of the chatbot's accuracy and the introduction of multilingual support are also on our plan to better reach global audience.