Reimagine Group Travel Experience — Tripanion

Traveling in a group is way more complicated than traveling by yourself. The struggle started from booking a trip together. Everyone has their own preference. Some prefer morning flights to later; some prefer taking direct flights than having one or two layovers; some prefer staying at a luxury hotel than budget hotels that are closer to the attractions. The bottom line, it is a daunting task to book a trip that satisfies everyone.

As a frequent group traveler, I know the pain. That’s why I worked with three team members, one designer, and three software engineers, on imagining what a pleasant group travel booking experience can be.

Here comes Tripanion

Tripanion, which is a wordplay between trip and companion, provides an all-in-one group trip booking experience. It can not only provide the best travel deal, but also real-time engagement elements, such as video call, audio call, and messaging.

When you are booking a group trip with your friends, you don’t have to jump between trip booking platforms, such as Expedia, and a communication platform, such as WhatsApp and iMessage. Every trip-related communication is saved on the platform and categorized by each trip.

If you think texting is too slow, you can start a group call together and discuss the trip details live! Thanks to Agora’s RTE API, the group call can support 17 people in the same room with ultra-low latency (400ms).

How did we build it

We used Amadeus’s Airline API to fetch the latest flight information, and Agora’s API for video, audio, and messaging service. This is the project we built for DeveloperWeek 2020 Hackathon. Because of the 48 hours timeframe, we could not get all the features we wanted to work on. But we did successfully connect to Amadeus’s server and database (Flight Offers Search), received the callback, and fetch the flight information. We also connected to Agora’s RTC engine to initiate the calls and messaging feature.

The challenges we had

The biggest challenge we had was definitely the short timeline. But this is not a secret to all hackathon participants. The next challenge we had was to figure out how to organize the humongous amount of various categories of information.

Amadeus is such a powerful API that can provide all the details about every step of the booking experience that you can think of. Also because of that, we need to handle a number of categories of information. We only started working with the flight booking feature. But within the JSON callback, there is information about the flight stop, carrier entry, operating flight, destination, etc. We had to decide which information is useful for the users, which is not.

And keep in mind, this is only the “Flight Offers Search” feature. There are other API calls such as “Flight Cheapest Date Search”, “SeatMap Display”, “Flight Inspiration Search”, “Flight Restrictions”, and many more! The same amount of effort would go to other parts of the trip booking experience as well, such as hotel, attraction, rental cars, etc.

Thankfully, because I am fairly familiar with Agora’s API, the Real-Time Engagement features implementation was going well.

What can be better

Tripanion is a project we made for DeveloperWeek 2020 Hackathon. Because of the timeline, we only made an MVP. Had we had more time, we would love to complete the entire trip booking experience, including flight and hotel search and reservation features.

In addition to that, here are the features we can envision for adding more value proposition for this platforms:

• Interactive screenshare experience (Agora SDK: screenshare + whiteboard): Rather than describing the trip details in words, why don’t we let all the users see the same screen? The platform should allow any users in the group to screenshare their trip information to others, and others can highlight or mark it on the screenshare. Agora already provides these features.
• Repository of places to visit: Tripanion should also allow users to add and save all the places they want to visit in the destination and sync across users. It can be a list of restaurants they want to go to or a list of attractions they want to visit.
• Trip summary: After the group has finalized the trip details, Tripanion should be able to provide an easy-to-understand trip itinerary and summary, including information like flight information, hotel location, transportation, daily itinerary, budget range, etc.
• Trip optimization based on booking party’s frequent traveler information, loyalty program, and airline/hotel preference (Amadeus API: Flight Offers Price + SeatMap Display): Who doesn’t like getting some rewards from the travel? Tripanion should allow users to store all kinds of frequent traveler and loyalty program information, and optimize the seating and pricing based on the travel preference and loyalty program.
• Lounge/credit card perks preference (Discover API: Airport Lounge Locator): Travel hacker always wants to maximize their loyalty and credit card benefit. That’s why Tripanion should also provide information on lounges in the airports.
• Native application: We built the MVP on the web. It is not an optimal platform for users who may be on the move. That’s why it’s important to launch the native application on both iOS and Android. We may potentially use Flutter or React Native for this purpose.
• Trip charges splitting feature (similar to Splitwise): It is a simple feature that many current travel applications do not have. All travelers in the group can join a shared tab. Whoever pays for the item for the trip can add the charge in the tab. By the end of the trip, they can settle the tab and transfer the owe amount to each other through Venmo or Cash App.
• Different departure locations (Amadeus API: Flight Offers Price): The current MVP only supports one departure location. There may be instances where you and your friends are traveling from a different location. Tripanion should provide flight options from the different departure locations.

In the end

Tripanion is a project that my teammates and I are really proud of. Not only did we reimagine the online group travel experience, which is estimated at over $400 billion in the market, but also solved a problem that we all had experienced before.

Oh also, the icing on the cake, we won Amadeus’s hackathon challenge that day!

It started as an MVP, but we dream further and show what the online group travel experience can be.