Let's Book

SBB Challenge hack at START Hack 2018.

The Challenge

Have you ever been travelling in Asia by public transport ? E.g. Bus in Bangkok: A timetable in Thai appears to Swiss people in funny unknown signs. Desperately searching for a hint, the eye falls on Arabic numbers. Gratefully for this piece of information we have to decide to board the bus or not. But also virtually on Arabic or Hebrew websites the orientation appears difficult for Europeans even with English translation, because the reading flows in these languages from left to right, that influences design of the website. These are good cases to belief that Asian tourists may experience the same with Swiss websites. Here our challenge takes place:

How might we support foreigner travel agencies within a decision support system to advise, customise and book Swiss tours for their customers in terms of rail tickets and points of interests?

Swiss railway provides foreigner travel agencies with train tickets and interacts with travel tour providers in a network over interfaces. To support foreigner travel agencies in advising their customers, information has to be edited and presented in a suitable way. The goal is a happy traveler and a relaxed agent thanks to the decision making support of a system that runs your code.

Our Solution

Our Beliefs

We believe that recreation should never be followed or anticipated by stress. We firmly believe that the freedom of designing it's own experience should be effortless.

How we're gonna achieve it

We want to reduce the constrains of the traveler. We want to get rid of his responsibilities and trouble. We basically want to change how traveler and travel agent communicate.

What we've done

We developed a slick application composed by three major parts. I. Get the users preferences through an easy to use web application. II. Drafting an 100% individualized trip based on users preferences. III. Giving the travel agent the possibility to finalize the pre-drafted trip.

What we've used

We used a node/express server to collect the traveler's preferences and to give the travel agent the drafted trip.

Accomplishments

We are proud creating an elegant mobile user interface for the customer to use to enable the travel agent to better assess the customer's needs. Having never used Bootstrap before, we feel positive about using a modern, sophisticated CSS framework to build an intuitive and appealing application. We also wrote a complete backend server and API using node.js, and we are proud of how much effort went in to making an asynchronous, highly scalable yet flexible backend.

Where we had to think a bit more

We struggled to get our application to connect with the SBB API, but once we found a workaround we were happy to have accomplished this API usage successfully.

What's next for Let's Book

We struggled to get our application to connect with the SBB API, but once we found a workaround solution to make AJAX requests on the backend rather than on the front end, we were happy to have accomplished this API linkage successfully.

We intend to further refine SBB Hack in order to clearly present the tour information to a client – a travel agent, with a flexible, modern, striking user interface. We intend to improve the tour generation process, perhaps through machine learning – we can use this to determine what would constitute a good tour and learn from the adjustments that a travel agent makes. The goal is to minimize the work for the travel agent, and our app would do this effectively.