Traveldoola: My Take on Trip Planning

Ever stumbled across a cool restaurant on Instagram, only to completely forget about it when you finally visit that city? Yeah, me too. A lot.

As someone who loves to travel, I kept running into three main headaches:

1. Forgetting about all those cool spots I'd seen online when I actually got to a new city.
2. Struggling to plan trips around saved locations and figure out where to stay.
3. Wasting hours checking a bunch of different sites for flight deals.

These pain points bugged me enough that I decided to build something to solve them. That's how Traveldoola was born.

The Spreadsheet That Started It All

Before I dove into building Traveldoola, I actually cobbled together a Google Spreadsheet to help streamline my travel planning. It was pretty basic, but it got the job done:

• I hooked it up to various APIs (Uber, Airbnb, Yelp, FlightAware) using Apps Script to pull in data automatically.
• You could paste in URLs and the spreadsheet would query APIs to grab relevant info.
• It would automatically populate images, pricing, and other details for accommodations and restaurants.
• It even pulled in flight info from the FlightAware API.

This spreadsheet became surprisingly popular among my friends. So much so that I ended up turning it into a shareable template. You can check it out here if you're curious.

After the success of the Google Spreadsheet prototype, I started sketching out the design and features for Traveldoola. The initial concept included:

• Visual bookmarking from any website or social media platform
• Collaborative trip planning with friends and family
• Flight deal aggregation and personalized email alerts
• Chrome extension for bookmarking

Visual Bookmarking:

• Users can save and organize rich, visual bookmarks from any website or social media platform.
• Custom scrapers extract relevant information and images from popular sites.
• Automatic geolocation tagging for easy reference.

Trip Planning:

• Create and share trip plans with friends.
• Add bookmarks to trips for easy visualization of planned activities.
• Overlay accommodation options with saved locations to find the optimal place to stay.

Flight Deals:

• Scrapes multiple flight deal websites to find the best offers.
• Personalized email notifications for deals matching user's home airport.
• Visual representation of deals with destination images.

Backend (Django, Celery, Redis)

• Django for the main web application and API endpoints.
• Celery for handling asynchronous tasks like web scraping and email sending.
• Redis as a message broker for Celery and for caching frequently accessed data.

Web Scraping and API Integration

• Custom scrapers for popular websites (e.g., Yelp, Instagram, Facebook).
• Fallback HTML parser for extracting images and videos from unsupported sites.
• Integration with external APIs for flight deals and image sources.

Chrome Extension

• Developed using JavaScript and Chrome Extension APIs.
• Communicates with the Traveldoola backend to save bookmarks.

Email Notifications (Sendgrid API)

• Integration with Sendgrid for sending personalized flight deal alerts.

Image Processing and Geotagging

• EXIF data analysis for extracting geolocation from images.
• Integration with Unsplash API for accessing free, high-quality travel images.

As part of launching Traveldoola, I dove into social media marketing to attract early users and gather feedback. This process involved:

Creative Design

• I experimented with various visual styles and messaging to create eye-catching social media posts.

A/B Testing

• Ran small-scale tests to determine which creatives resonated most with potential users.

Engagement Analysis

• Tracked likes, shares, and comments to refine our marketing strategy.

I've since stopped working on this, but thoughts at the time:

• Create iOS and Android apps for on-the-go planning.
• Implement ML for personalized travel suggestions.
• Integrate directly with travel services for comprehensive planning.
• More shareable travel tips and experiences.