Design and functionality for
Travel Bud Web Application

Authentication module

Within this module, the user can access all the account related actions, from creating a new account to updating the data from the profile.

For authentication, on the landing page the visitors can access the “Sign In” button that redirects them to an Authentication Webpage where there 2 options:

• Log in - if they already have an account they can authenticate using the email and the password, or they can use Google/Facebook credentials. The "Forgot password" option will send an email to the user's email containing a link for reseting the password.
• Sign up - for new users that want to create an account. In order to achieve that, the following data are reuquired:
  • Personal Information: first name, last name, email, password , birth date;
  • Preferences - the user has the posibility to select multiple criteria that will be taken into consideration when recommendations are made(to be detailed in the Recommendations module).
  • Google Calendar account - by checking the "Sync Flight Events with google Calendar" checkbox, the user is prompted to introduce the Google Calendar credentials and he is asked if he agrees for the Web app to access data from his calendar.

Buddies module

Within this module, the user has the posibility to manage the buddies and the groups that they belong to.

For this module the following rules apply:

• Every user must be assigned to a group.
• A group can't be removed if it contains at least one buddy. All the buddies must be removed from the group in order to be able to remove the group also.

Flights module

Besides recommendations, users have to posibility to search flights according to other criteria that they can select from the form(Departure date/Arrival dates and locations, criteria like travel business, airline company, travel criteria). The results are returned in form of a list and for each item there is an additional book button which redirects the user to a credit card payment page.

Reports Module

The user will be able to obtain different types of reports:

• map - a real-time world map that will have marked countries/cities visited until current date. The map will be presented in Flash format.

  

• List of Flights - the chart can be customized to show the flights based on certain parameters:
  • User - the field is autocompleted with "Me" meaning the flights will be shown for the logged user, but the dropdown list allows the user to select another person(from a group that they are both part of).
  • Period - the start date and the end date for which the flights will be shown.
  • Airline - one or more companies can be selected
  By pressing the "Show flights" button, the chart is refreshed with the filtered data.

  

Personas

Group of users

• Administrator - the main role of this user consists in maintaining the Web tool, user management (roles, privileges) and testing.
• Manager – with deep experience in the travelling field, the manager overseas all the features of the application, making decision based on the reports available in the Report Menu.
• Regular users – are represented by all people interested in travelling cheap and easy, which do not have so many time to search for flights. Their interaction with app will be presented next.

Primary - Regular Users

Main activities

1. busy business man
2. likes to travel but has no time to organise and schedule trips/flights
3. travels frequently both for work and for pleasure

Main activities

1. likes to travel
2. low budget -> interested in offers
3. makes frequent visits to Kazahstan to meet with his relatives

Main activities

1. likes to travel with her friends(+ their families)
2. finds it hard to synchronize an ideal time for trips
3. is interested in all sort of flight deals and offers

Secondary – management & maintenance users

Personas

• Manager - experience in travel field, data driven, needs real time reports in order to improve business.
• Administrator - maintenance functionalities of the Web Tool

Main activities

1. overseas the features of Travel Bud
2. consults on daily bases the reports on the use of the web tool by regular users
3. makes pertinent decision regarding future improvements, new features etc

Main activities

1. sets up administrator and service accounts
2. maintains system documentation
3. interacts with users and evaluates the features of the application
4. tests functionalities of the Web Tool

Branding

Travel Bud project represents the ultimate Web application destined for all travellers of the world. Our motto “Travel Bud – Your everyday Travel Assistant” captures our main objective – to satisfy travelling needs for busy people, which don’t have too much time to book tickets, look for best offers or make reservations.

As time has become priceless, Travel Bud is the best tool to save people’s time and money by becoming more focused on customer’s needs and wishes.

While our concept relies on ultimate technologies, it comes under a friendly design, easy to use applications with personalized features, depending on the user.

The colours used for Travel Bud have been chosen using a specific application (Paletton.com). We chose the use mostly blue for all pages of the application due to the relaxing and calming effect of this colour.

Similar Approaches

GetGoing

If your plans are flexible, take advantage of the website GetGoing, which promises to save travelers up to 40 percent. Choose two destinations in the same region of the world (for example, Vienna and Geneva, or Costa Rica and Panama) and enter your travel dates. Then provide your billing information to complete your reservation. The Get Going team randomly selects one of your two options.

SeatGuru

Enter an airline and flight number and SeatGuru calls up a detailed airplane plan, indicating seats that are desirable (emergency exits, those with extra legroom, etc.), average, and simply bad (reduced legroom or recline). It also has reviews of different airline services, as well as quick-scan icons for such in-flight amenities as food, entertainment, in-seat power ports, and Wi-Fi.

PinTrips

The idea of pinning something on the web began with Pinterest. Now, Pintrips brings that kind of functionality to online airfare searches. You can pin fare results you like and collect them in a personal folder on the Pintrips site. It makes it easy to compare your flight options and share them with others.

System Internals

Travel Bud Technology Stack

Authentication

TravelBud authentication will be cloud based, using OAuth 2.0 protocol for Google APIs and Facebook Login for user login and authorization. We came up with this idea starting from the need of a decoupled API-based microservices architecture.

Facebook API Permissions: email, public_profile, user_friends, user_likes
Google Scopes:

• https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.email
• https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.profile
• https://www.googleapis.com/auth/plus.login (for circles and social)

Module Endpoints

AccuWeather API

• The AccuWeather API provides access to location based weather data via a simple RESTful web interface.
• Data responses are returned in JSON.
• The resource used is LocalWeather, which provides weather data for a particular location. LocalWeather searches require a location key which is provided by AccuWeather and it can be obtained from the response of a text search, city search, geolookup search, postal code search, or point of interest search. Our application mainly uses the city search option.
• The API provides more than 3.5 million searchable locations, with many cities having alternate names, or aliases, defined to provide flexibility when searching for a particular location. Aliases are used to account for common alternate spellings (Saint Louis, St. Louis, St Louis), historical names (Ho Chi Minh City, Saigon), and accepted alternate names (Derry, Londonderry).
• Includes current condition observations, 10 day forecasts and also photos displaying current condition observations (they are optional, and in order to be obtained, an additional parameter is added:"getPhotos=true").

OpenFlights Data API

• OpenFlights Airports Database contains over 10,000 airports, train stations and ferry terminals spanning the globe. Every airport has a unique identifier, a name and the main city that it serves.
• It allows the user to map flights around the world, search and filter them and calculate statistics. It also provides information about airport route maps and airline that fly there.
• We will use the Airlines Database as well, which contains 5888 airlines.
• The Route Database is the most important one, as it contains 59036 routes between 3209 airports on 531 airlines spanning the globe. It is important to find the most useful route for our users based on their preferences.

Calendar API

The Calendar API is a REST API that accessed through explicit HTTP calls; the API exposes most of the features available in the Google Calendar Web interface.

The application must use OAuth 2.0 to authorize requests. No other authorization protocols are supported. As our application uses Google Sign-In, some aspects of authorization are handled.

Google Calendar allows client applications to view and update calendar events in the form of JSON feeds. Our application uses Google Calendar API v3 to create new events, edit or delete existing events, and query for events that match particular criteria

The application also uses a Google Calendar Gadget, a custom HTML and Javascript component that runs within an iframe and it can be easily embedded in the web page. The gadget is used to create the calendar specific to a single user, but also the calendar shared with the other users(in the case of groups). Using JSON protocol, events are added to the user's calendar instead of included as an external calendar, so write calls are being made to a user's calendar (read/write access to Calendars, based on authentication criteria).

A standard calendar event entry in JSON format looks something like this:
{
"summary": "Puppy's birthday",
"start":{"date": "2017-02-02"},
"end": {"date":"2017-02-03"}
}

Of course, extra JSON elements can be added, depending on the complexity of the event.

Conclusion

After a quick review of Travel Bud and its main features it is obvious why the application can be considered as one of the highest particularized solutions for travelers nowadays. Travel Bud comes recommended by a long list of benefits for the users, mostly for the fact that:

• it is an unique application which combines information from several platforms
• it is highly competitive in comparison with similar projects
• it is designed for specific needs of today’s travelers
• it is based on the newest and most innovative technologies

In the future, a more detailed description of the application, its function and features will complete „the big picture” on Travel Bud, making it your favourite traveler guide all over the world!