More creativity and masses of hard work from developers as a teams from Skyscanner and Flocations brought a new idea to planning business trips and also capturing the best travel reviews.
The two teams won the second THack held in Singapore to coincide with the annual WebinTravel conference this week.
Winning the category for teams with two or fewer members was Skyscanner, led by developer Joe Sarre, creating a new way to book business travel trips using just one click.
Using APIs from Travelport, OAG, Expedia Affiliate Network, Jeppesen, Google, GeoNames and Google Transit, Sarre and his fellow team member built a system where users paste the address and time/date of a business meeting into a search and get a range of options back, best suited to the time and venue of the meeting.
This includes ground transport and check-in times for flights, etc.
Once a user selects an schedule ("give them options to veto, rather than options to wade through"), each stage of the journey is given and an option shown to send the plan to a personal assistant for booking.
Presentation deck:
Chair of the judging panel (alongside Professor Adrian David Cheok, Keio University Graduate School of Media Design in Japan, and Arun Lee, head of technology and innovation, AirAsia), Valyn Perini, CEO of the OpenTravel Alliance, says:
"Joe and his fellow developer addressed the often ignored market of unmanaged business travel, with potential here for it scale into a decent business. They simplified the user experience - and included point-to-point scheduling - so that it could be a very relevant to the business market. Great job on what was a lovely yet simple interface."
Winning the THack with a team of three or more developers was Flocations.
The group built a service called Friendly Planet Trips, using APIs from Vayant and OAG and integrated completely into the Facebook social graph.
The app works by displaying a Google Map within Facebook and plotting the picture of a friend in a destination if he or she has tagged their own images with the destination (multiple users are grouped).
All the images for a location are displayed when a user clicks on the friend's profile image. They can then send them a direct message to get recommendations or tips about the destination or a service.
Once a user decides on a destination, users can perform a normal flight search from within Facebook using a customised Vayant metasearch widget.
Presentation deck:
Judging chair Perini says:
"Flocations made a very nice use of Facebook to provide location information to friends. It was well thought out and executed. We especially liked how it had an obviously valuable proposition to an existing service."
Partners for THack @ WIT Singapore:
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