What It Does

Travel Buddy is an AI-powered travel planning app designed to take the stress out of organizing your next adventure. Instead of spending hours researching destinations, accommodations, and activities, Travel Buddy streamlines the process by asking you a series of thoughtful questions.

How We Built It

We kicked off our project with a clan of whiteboards, brainstorming and refining our ideas. Many concepts came and went, but after several iterations, we gathered enough information to move forward. We chose our tech stack, designed rough page layouts, and mapped out data flows before diving into development. Our stack included:

• Python & Django for backend development
• HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for the frontend
• AWS EC2 for deployment
• OpenAI for AI-powered recommendations

We tackled development page by page, refining the experience as we went. Along the way, we continuously updated our CSS file to improve the look and feel of the platform.

Challenges We Ran In To

Building Travel Buddy in just 24 hours was no small feat. Some of the biggest hurdles we encountered included:

• EC2 Deployment Issues – Setting up our AWS instance didn’t go as smoothly as expected.
• LLM Model Availability – The model we planned to use wasn’t accessible as expected, requiring us to pivot.
• Time Constraints – With only a day to build the project, we had to optimize every minute and make tough prioritization decisions.