Editor's note: PhocusWire is a co-sponsor of the
RouteStack Build Challenge described below.
An Aer Lingus digital product manager entering her first
hackathon has won the 21-day RouteStack Build Challenge with a conversational
hotel concierge designed for airline employees who fly standby.
Valentina Borovaya's product, StandByStay, addresses a
specific gap. Airline staff can fly standby at steep discounts but often don't
know which flight they've cleared until they are at the gate, which makes
booking a hotel in advance nearly impossible. StandByStay searches every
candidate destination in parallel, holds a top pick and a backup in each city
and only starts checkout through RouteStack
once the traveler confirms the flight. Borovaya built the product with Claude
Code.
Second place went to HotelZippo, built by travel technology
entrepreneur Varun Jain. The product compresses what can be 30 to 40 hours of research
for a family-friendly hotel into a single conversation, synthesizing hundreds
of reviews per property into specific guidance and returning one
recommendation. When a hotel has an active issue such as ongoing refurbishment,
HotelZippo surfaces the warning in red above the top pick. Bookings run through
RouteStack's hotel API with webhooks tracking each order from pending to
confirmed.
Third place went to MatchRoute, built by Stijn Risseeuw, an computer
science and engineering student at TU Delft. MatchRoute moves group trip
planning off group chats and spreadsheets into a shared dashboard, where an
artificial intelligence assistant helps groups work through budgets, dates
and destinations with interactive maps, calendars and voting polls. Once the
group aligns, MatchRoute pulls live inventory from RouteStack to generate five
tailored trip options.
All three winning products transact through RouteStack,
which provides live flight, hotel and rental car inventory with checkout and
payouts handled on-platform. Entries were judged by a three-person panel that
included Phocuswright senior
manager of research and innovation Mike Coletta, with scoring based on
real-world usefulness, originality, technical execution and presentation.
"The winning entries make the case better than we
could," said Yogesh Kapadne, CTO at RouteStack.
"Three people, working alone, shipped travel products in three weeks that
search live inventory and complete real bookings. The supplier contracts,
payments and compliance were already in place. They brought the ideas."
The challenge ran June 8 through July 6 and was open to
individual developers globally. First place receives a seven-night resort stay
and $1,000 in RouteStack API credits. Second place receives a seven-night
resort stay and $500 in credits. Third place receives $1,000 in credits. All
participants also receive a year of access to a private travel club operated by
Custom Travel Solutions, parent company of RouteStack.
Winning products and maker profiles are at routestack.ai/event/build-challenge-winners.