Seattle - April 2019
The 11th edition of IATA AIR Hackathon took place in Seattle at Expedia Group offices. Over 100 developers worked around the clock in order to present their projects with the support of industry experts and mentors.
The main theme was to improve the leisure and business travel passenger experience through dynamic offers using any New Distribution Capability (NDC) API
A total of 21 projects were presented.
APIs available at the event
NDC APIs: Delta Air Lines, Virgin Atlantic, NDC Exchange (ATPCO/SITA), SunExpress, British Airways, American Airlines
Travel APIs: Expedia Group, SITA, Guudjob, LinkedIn, Cirium, ATPCO
Sponsors
Platinum Sponsor (Host Organization): Expedia Group
Gold Sponsors: IBS Sofware, Boeing, Cirium and TIBCO
Supporting Organization: AWS Travel and Microsoft
Prizes
For Corporates: NDC Leisure Travel Prize and NDC Business Travel Prize (presentation at IATA event), Best Sentiment Analysis
For Non-Corporates: NDC Leisure Travel Prize (USD 5,000 + incubation), NDC Business Travel Prize (USD 5,000 + incubation), Developer Prize (USD 2,000 + incubation), Best Sentiment Analysis (USD 2,000 + incubation), and Ready to Take off Prize (incubation only)
Business Travel Corporate Prize
Team Name: EZ Trip (Delta Air Lines)
Challenge: Business and Leisure Travel
APIs used: Delta, SITA
Project Description: Travel intent is to see your sister [leisure] or interview [business]. At the moment this means you have to research nearest airport locations for your destination and where you currently located before booking a trip.
Our product allows you to select your destination by clicking on your sister in Facebook or business contact in LinkedIn and your origin is taken from GPS. The flight options are presented and booking details are displayed inline.
Team Members: Mathew Schlichting, Krishna Kumar, Jared Tuck, Miquel Quintero
Leisure Travel Corporate Prize
Team Name: Sky Kids (TCS - Tata Consulting)
Challenge: Leisure Travel
APIs used: Delta, Expedia Group, British Airways, Guudjob, SITA
Project Description: Unaccompanied minor or UMNR is a frequent scenario. Whether traveling for a camp or to visit family, sometimes allowing your child to fly alone cannot be avoided.
Tata Consulting team proposed a solution to keep UMNR’s travel SECURED and ENTERTAINED while assisting parents to TRACK and BE IN TOUCH with the kid from home to his arrival at destination. This attempt to give Family the BEST DEALS taking the school calendar and provide ONE-CLICK booking and provide airlines with all required mandatory info regarding Health , food allergy, connections , IDs and help them gain REVIEW and FEEDBACK .The project provides digital wallet for inflight snacks for the kids.
The project used Artificial Intelligence, Amazon Lex Virtual Assistant, GPS and Beacon Tech, Amazon comprehend Services for sentimental Analysis and also travel and NDC APIs.
Team Members: Amrita Ray, Anil Prakash Singh, Pablo Cepeda
Best Sentiment Analysis Corporate Prize
Team Name: Furious Kittens (Expedia Group)
Challenge: Business and Leisure Travel
APIs used: Delta, Expedia Group, British Airways, Twitter
Project Description: Expedia Group team presented a group booking tool. By using smart defaults, taking account traveler preference by arrival time dynamically, showing activities, asking for upvotes from group travelers (or choosing to trust the admin) give a seamless experience when planning for group travel.
Team Members: Connie Chen, Freddy Guime, Cindy Wang, Akshay Jain, Andrew Chen, Maria Christina Joaquin
Business Travel Non-Corporate Prize
Team Name: Supersonic (Duffel)
Challenge: Business Travel
APIs used: Delta, Virgin Atlantic, American Airlines
Project Description: Duffel team built a tool that makes it easy for business travellers to automate the response to common scenarios, like flights being delayed or meetings being rescheduled. Think “If this then that” or Siri Shortcuts.
Travelers are be able to pick from a library of “Actions” and “Triggers”. An Action would be “book a flight”, “send a text message” or “get my TMC to call me”. A “Trigger” would be “flight rescheduled”, “check in open” or a “meeting date updated”.
Users are able to drag and drop and connect all these actions and triggers in a visual editor. The solution makes it super simple to tie in different online and offline services in order to handle common disruption scenarios in a personalized, self-service way.
Team Members: Steve Domin, Vincent Pastor, Alan Kennedy, Tim Rogers, Igor de Paula, Tiago Botelho
Leisure Travel Non-Corporate Prize
Team Name: Goodfynd
Challenge: Business and Leisure Travel
APIs used: SITA, Cirium
Project Description: Goodfynd presented a module that enables convenience and peace of mind for the busy traveler. The Goodfynd app enables travelers to discover and order from airport retail and food & drink concession vendors. The solution integrates with SITA API to pull in boarding pass information so the travelers have it in their fingertips. In addition SITA “wait-time” data is passed to food vendors to help them to manage and process orders more efficiently. The “flight status” and “flight tracker” data from Cirium API enables Goodfynd to recommend concession vendors based on the traveler’s gate/flight information.
Team Members: Lemaire Stewart, Durell Hart, Kyle Miller and Kelvin Yuen
Best Sentiment Analysis Non-Corporate Prize
Team Name: Nearsoft
Challenge: Business Travel
APIs used: Expedia API, Delta NDC API, Guudjob, Freshdesk and Freddy Bot API
Project Description: Support agents in a Travel Management Company (TMC) need to look for air, land and sea services through a GDS either for past bookings or making new ones. However, they cannot access this information directly in their help desk platform and that creates a broken process where they are constantly going back and forth between platforms to update information and give timely customer support.
Having the ability to book inside their help desk platform, like Freshdesk, through an NDC integration will help them troubleshoot much faster and have all the data in one place.
The Sherpa App provides that seamless integration to an NDC API, leveraging the flexibility of a SaaS help desk platform and a conversational chatbot to take away the complexity of corporate travel, so Travel Managers provide an omnichannel booking experience.
Nearsoft personalized the experience through user profiling, giving managers a flexible reporting module that connects bookings data with helpdesk information. Now organizations can have more control over their travel budget and generate insights that can give Travel Managers a deep understanding on their corporate spent.
Team Members: Claudio Cossio, Liliana Reina, Hector Benitez, Juventino Romero
View the demos: Freshdesk Travel Manager app and Sherpa - chatbot to book flights and hotel
Developer Non-Corporate Prize
Team Name: Reifly
Challenge: Leisure Travel
APIs used: Delta Air Lines, SITA, Google Calendar, Facebook Graph
Project Description: : Reifly is your new best friend to buy travel. It knows before you do, where you want to go and when the time is right for you.
We leverage on your historical trip data and your availability combined with your online behavior and social media and analyze it all to push offers so you can buy in a few clicks.
This technology can also be provided as white-label solution for OTAs or integrated into an airline app so these companies can use our cognitive modeling to better know their own customers and provide predictive offers, increase shop/buy conversion and sales.
Team Members: Julie Berteloot, Navi Singh, Hing Deng, Jamy Southafeng, Mary Liu
Ready to Take Off Non-Corporate Prize
Team Name: Swipe-see
Challenge: Leisure Travel
APIs used: (to be confirmed)
Project Description: Swipe-See is a travel activity discovery app that uses machine learning to intuit the flyers’ preferences to present them with personalized flight experiences.
Team Members: Joseph Armes, Jakub Svec, Diane Chiang, Karen NG, Brandon Yu
