Fitur > HackaTrips 2018!
Last weekend was awesome and we won the prize for the best app using APIs from BBVA API Market at HackaTrips hackathon organised by minube! So let me tell you a bit about HackaTrips and what we did!
We were featured in the Sunday Times. Read the story in the newspaper!
We were also featured on the BBVA homepage! Read the BBVA report (in Spanish) in the this link 👇
Fitur and HackaTrips!
FITUR is one of the biggest global meeting points for tourism professionals all over the world! Fitur 2018, the 38th edition, made of a new record with 251,000 visitors from more than 165 countries, 2.5% more than 2017. A key theme of this year’s Fitur was digital transformation of the tourism industry and entrepreneurship linked to tourism and technology. As a consequence, the presence of technology professionals in Fitur have grown by 16%.
If you are living in Madrid, Fitur is a great opportunity to take a tour around the world from Asia to Latin America without even leaving the city. Since I moved to Madrid, I never miss a chance to visit Fitur!
In addition to enjoying traditional costumes and delicious food from many countries all over the world, another key reason for me to attend Fitur is HackaTrips! HackaTrips is a hackathon organized by minube where developers, designers, and experts in the tourism sector come together to develop innovative prototype solutions to burning issues in tourism industry. The first edition of HackaTrips started last year and it was an amazing event. Following its success last year, this year’s edition was sponsored by important companies in the tech sector such as ORACLE, BBVA API Market, and Hotels Combined.
Special thanks to Fran Álvarez and everyone at minube for their tremendous efforts in making hackatrips a really enjoyable event for all of us! It’s getting better each year! From good wired network connections, comfortable chairs, coffee, and red bulls to in-depth analysis of LinkedIn profiles of everyone to match the most suitable teams, every little detail was taken care of. Not to mention the cash prizes worth more than 18,000€! It was extremely well-organized. Kudos, minube 👏 👏
Team 18
Our team consisted of four members: Ricardo Crespo, Pablo Cano Huero, Mario Verdú Gambín, and Nandana Mihindukulasooriya (myself). Even though we met each other for the first time during the event, we were able to make a great (award-winning 😄) team! Minube had put a lot of effort to match our skills in such a way that we could work together easily and efficiently while complementing each other’s skills. It was a pleasant coincidence that Ricardo, Pablo, and I all were working on Artificial Intelligence related topics! We were Java devs of the team while Mario was the designer.
From 10:00 AM on Saturday 20th, we spent more than 12 hours working together physically in IFEMA and almost one complete night virtually in slack discussing the ideas, brainstorming, programming, deploying and making slides. It was intense but we enjoyed every minute of it!
Grupa, our idea!
Like all teams, our goal was to find a problem or a challenge that is not solved adequately by current products and services in the tourism industry. Though it was a bit unfortunate that we didn’t have a tourism expert in our team, we all were vivid travellers, so we brainstormed ideas based on our experiences while travelling, both good and bad!
- Tourist Congestion On the one hand, we noticed that some places always get overly crowded with tourists. For instance, places such as Madrid or Barcelona are full of tourists to the level that the life of residents in some areas of the city are negatively affected by tourism. On the other hand, businesses in smaller towns and villages just outside these big cities get closed due to lack of visitors. So here are some issues we brainstormed: Can we help to distribute this large volume of tourists in a more intelligent manner? Can we help tourists to find places that are not overly-crowded? Can we help tourists find the best time to visit a given places? Can we give some incentive to encourage them (lower prices, discounts?)
- Travel sharing Most of us like to travel in groups. In addition to humans being social beings who like to be surrounded by friends and share our personal experiences with others, there are other reasons for travelling in groups. Group travels are generally more economical, much safer, and fun. However, it is not easy to form groups with people who have same likes, dislikes, social interests and similar budgets. We don’t want groups to spend hours arguing which attractions they want to visit because their likes are so diverse. Further, we don’t want the group to run in to uncomfortable situations, for example, where few people want to have dinner at the most expensive restaurant while others are don’t want to spend a fortune in one dinner. So we were thinking, can we help to form better groups with similar likes and interests and also similar budgets but without having to bother the users thousand questions? Can we build detailed profiles for users without asking them even a single question?
- Tourist pricing Some restaurants and other tourism related businesses try to scam tourists with prices that are much higher than the normal. We believe this is not healthy and not a good thing in the long term. So, can we warn tourists not to pay unnecessarily high prices? Can we somehow introduce good Samaritans into the picture to save tourists from these traps?
Having these issues in mind, our idea was to build an app (Grupa) that will provide a platform to tourists to form groups with people of similar interests and budgets. The app will also help the users to discover places to visit that are not crowded. We also wanted to introduce local guides to the app who can show their towns, villages, cities and save tourists from paying overly expensive prices. All this, we wanted to perform using the data provided by APIs from minube, BBVA API Market, and Hotels Combined.
Grupa, is an application for strategic visitor flow management and the governance of destinations by analyzing the anonymized and aggregated credit card transaction histories. It is a travel sharing platform where people could form groups and discover hidden tourist destinations. The platform created profiles for users automatically by analyzing their expense patterns on leisure activities and used those profiles to suggest groups with similar interests.
Implementation
While building Grupa, the first challenge was to build user profiles for grouping tourists with similar interests and similar budgets in order to form compatible traveller groups. We wanted reliable, up to date information about the users so we can generate such detailed profiles. After discussing with mentors from BBVA API Market, we figured that we can use the transaction history of users to build a very detailed profile without even bothering them with a single question (if the users authorize us to access their data through BBVA Connect).
- BBVA Customer API: If user authorized us using BBVA connect, we used the customer API to collect the personal profile information such as name, gender, birth date, address, and email without the user having to fill anything in.
- BBVA Accounts API: Again, given user authorization, the accounts API allowed us to access the list of accounts of the user, and the transaction history of each account. Each transaction was tagged with a category (e.g., 11-Leisure and travel, 15-Transport, 53-Shows and performances, 56-Bars and restaurants, 57-Hotels,71-Airline) so that we could build a profile analysing those transactions. Not only we could know the likes and dislikes, we could also build a model to predict what’s the range that a given person would spend on a given activity.
- BBVA SEL API: Given an address, SEL API can provide socio-economic and lifesytle information about a family living in that specific house or in the neighbourhood based on the estimations done using public data sources. For instance, this information includes estimated value of the house, the rent or mortgage, family income, number of phone lines, saving capacity, etc. Such information can be used as input for the budget each person might have and also to group people with same socio-economic patterns and lifestyles.
We extensively used data from BBVA APIs both to understand social interests and economic behaviour of the users and to predict the occupancy patterns of places. We really appreciate all the guidance and help given by the mentors from BBVA API Market to understand the APIs and to use them in our app. A special thanks should go to David Ramos, Alberto González, Raul Lucas, Fran Froufe, and Jose Manuel from BBVA API Market!
The second challenge was how to find nice tourist destinations that are not overly-crowded. We not only wanted to discover interesting tourist destinations (POIs, Points-of-Interest) but also find the occupancy patterns for each destination (per month, per day-of-the-week, as well as per each hour of the day).
Minube API: Minube is a famous website visited by more than 2.7 million tourists and contains tourist attractions (POIs) from more than 15,000 cities all over the world. We used minube to extract the list of countries and cities and also to get all the tourist attractions around a given point.
BBVA PayStats API: PayStats API provided us anonymized and aggregated statistical data from millions of transactions performed using credit cards in a given area. For a given day of a week, or a given hour of the day, we could get the aggregated information such as number of transactions, maximum and minimum values of transactions, origins of the card holders, and other information related consumers’ habits, demographics, and origins.
HotelsCombined API: Hotels Combined integrates the availability information and prices from all the top travel websites from around the world, including Booking.com, Expedia, Hotels.com, Agoda, AccorHotels, Hilton and many others. Using the Hotels Combined API we could access the hotels close to a given attraction, their occupancy, and the prices. We used this information to guide tourists to less-crowded and economical destinations.
Finally, we combined all these into a webapp where users could register using BBVA Connect and authorize the app to access the relevant data. The app suggested groups based on the socio-economical profiles of the users, and provided recommendations about places to visit and when to visit. Then, each group was connected with a local guide from the destination. We implemented the webapp backend using Java and Spring and used AngularJS for developing the frontend.
Here’s a glimpse of the Webapp 👇
The pitch
The final task of the hackathon was to present our idea, implementation, and a small demo to a panel of experts in the tourism industry including Víctor Badorrey, director of international relations at SEGITTUR, Ramón Puchades, freelance consultant on digital transformation, and Paco Bermejo, director of architecture at Oracle. It was a 5 mins pitch so everything had to be concise and clear. I believe we did a good job presenting our app!
Here is the complete slide deck that we used for the pitch 👇
Winners!!
Finally, after two days of hard work, we won the prize of 2,500€ for the app that makes the best use of APIs in the BBVA API Market! We were really happy that our efforts were recognized with such award! We were simply over the moon!
“It’s impressive to see how many good ideas emerge from the minds of these experts in such a short time and we are already thinking about how to organize an internal event in which we can give more time to think and develop these ideas with depth” ~ Raúl Lucas, Spain Country Manager, BBVA Open API.
Up next, HackaTrips 2019!
After this awesome experience, we are eagerly waiting for HackaTrips 2019!
Tweets from BBVA abouts the event!
