Team Name

TourMate

Team Members

Project Description

Welcome to TourMate!

AI-Powered Personalized Travel Itinerary App

TourMate is a revolutionary travel planning application that utilizes the power of generative AI to create personalized travel itineraries for users, catering to their preferences, accessibility requirements, and interests. The app seamlessly integrates data from South Australia, New South Wales, and Western Australia tourist attraction databases, along with Google Maps information, to offer a streamlined travel planning experience. It addresses the common challenges travelers face when planning trips by consolidating various functions into a single platform, enhancing the user's planning efficiency and reducing cognitive load.

Key Features

• Personalized Itinerary Generation: TourMate enables users to describe their desired travel activities, interests, and accessibility needs using free text. The AI-driven platform then generates tailored recommendations based on these inputs, taking into account accessibility requirements, budget, and preferences.

• Seamless Integration: Unlike traditional travel planning that requires toggling between various platforms, TourMate combines essential functions like location searches, reviews, recommendations, curated lists, and contact details in one place. This integration simplifies the planning process and minimizes user frustration.

• Accessibility Focus: Recognizing the challenges faced by travelers with accessibility requirements, TourMate places a strong emphasis on catering to their needs. The app considers factors such as wheelchair access and suggests places that align with the user's desired activities while ensuring their comfort and inclusivity.

• Customization and Map Interface: Users can further personalize their itineraries through drag-and-drop functionality, selecting specific places from the recommendations and arranging them according to their preferences. A user-friendly map interface provides clear navigation instructions, ensuring a smooth travel experience.

• Direct Reservations and Contact Details: TourMate not only offers recommendations but also provides direct links to the websites of recommended places and their contact details. Users can easily make reservations and inquiries, eliminating the need to switch between different platforms for this information.

• Data Sources: The app utilizes open datasets provided by the Australian Government, South Australian Government, and NSW Government. It enhances the information by integrating Google Maps API data, including user ratings and pricing information, to offer a comprehensive perspective on attractions and restaurants.

Future Improvements:

One of TourMate's future enhancements is the incorporation of a voice-to-text capability. This feature will allow users to interact with the app through voice commands, making the planning process even more intuitive and accessible. By adding this functionality, TourMate aims to provide a convenient alternative to typing, accommodating users who prefer voice-based interactions.

TourMate revolutionizes travel planning by harnessing generative AI and intelligent data integration. The app's ability to create personalized itineraries while considering accessibility needs, coupled with its streamlined interface and future voice-to-text capability, promises to make travel planning more efficient, enjoyable, and inclusive for all users.

Data Story

The Data Story

Let’s be honest, the easiest part of traveling is booking a flight. The hardest part is figuring out the “must-do”, “top things to see” at the location to create those instagram-worthy moments. TourMate steps up to the challenge by harnessing the power of natural language processing and large-language models to understand you exactly! You tell TourMate in natural English text (or other languages for that matter) your budget, where you are going, and what you are interested in. From your input, we extract insights and entities before rationalising over vast datasets to serve you that perfectly curated tour - free of charge!

We utilise the open data sets provided by the Australian Government, SA, QLD, WA and NSW Governments to uncover hidden gems and points of interest for travellers and tourists alike such as Museums, Landmarks, Parks, Trails, and more. We further augment the data using Google Maps API Service (Maps, Places) to provide intelligence from crowdsourced data, including but not limited to User Ratings and Priciness of attractions and restaurants.

Every itinerary is staged before the user in the “Tailored For You” column, each attraction shows the star rating and wheelchair accessibility. From here, you simply drag attractions of interest into “Your Itinerary” and they will appear on the map. Of course reordering and removing is baked in to make the gamified experience seamless. The traditional Google Maps and Trip Advisor back and forth is finally gone, and a survey respondent this weekend even said they would pay a small fee for a simple app like this.

Thinking ahead, we now have the foundation to enable anyone to create their perfect itinerary. From here, the platform is rapidly expandable, we already link out to the websites, and have caching of the itinerary in the browser - so nothing gets lost when you refresh or close the tab. We are already thinking how TourMate can partner with cities to bring pre-curated collections to life. Give it a go.. we can’t wait to hear how TourMate will help you!