Travel2Gether
Travel2Gether was a weekend project that took 2nd place at the Expedia Hackathon. Our goal was to make it simple and cheap for friends and family from across the world to get to see each other more often.
Problem
We all have friends and family around the globe and it is expensive to travel to visit. How can we make it easy and cheap to find cheap locations to meet up with the people we care about?
Considerations
Cost
Cost was the number one factor when deciding whether to take a trip or not. We allowed users to set their own price alerts to better reflect their groups spending limit and make the app more user friendly.
Invitations
A simplified invitation system was key for user adoption. We decided to implement an SMS based invite system as it was a ubiquitous way of communication for our potential users who were from all age ranges and locations across the globe.
Simplicity
We knew that our users would need something that was intuitive and easy to use. Many current group travel solutions are too complicated. Simplicity was key for user adoption and was one of the most requested features during our user interviews.
Solution
An app where users can add friends and family, choose activities their interested in, their price point, and the app automatically scans for the best deals based on everyone's location.
Creating a Trip
We made creating a trip extremely simple. Simply set your price point and choose the activities you and your group are most interested in. Our system will then automatically add and track prices for the cities that meet your critieria. Invite all of your friends by their mobile number. Once they accept, they will automatically be added to the trip and will receive alerts when the price point is met.
I try to get together with my college friends who now live around the country, but it's really difficult to figure out where to go and easily pay for everything together
- user interview
Trip Page
Once a trip was created, users could see the latest prices and adjust the settings of their trip. Users could also chat with one another to confirm or deny purchasing a trip. All users could have to confirm a purchase before the trip would be confirmed.
Outcome
Our team came in 2nd place at the hackathon. We used a stack of .NET, Node.JS, and Angular on the front end to build our prototype.