Voyageur
Explore, Connect, Share, and Earn with Voyageur: Your All-in-One Travel Companion!
Created on 5th November 2023
•
Voyageur
Explore, Connect, Share, and Earn with Voyageur: Your All-in-One Travel Companion!
The problem Voyageur solves
-
Simplifying Trip Planning: Our product streamlines the often complex process of planning a trip, making it easier for travelers to research, select, and organize their journeys.
-
Booking Convenience: By offering the ability to book travel packages and flight tickets directly within the app, we eliminate the need for users to visit multiple websites or use different platforms, saving them time and hassle.
-
Empowering Travelers: We incentivize travelers to share their experiences, providing an opportunity for them to earn money through affiliate links, fostering a supportive community of explorers and encouraging them to contribute valuable content.
-
Comprehensive Travel Information: Our platform provides a wealth of information about various destinations, helping users make informed decisions about where to go and what to do.
-
Enhancing Engagement: We offer a space for like-minded travelers to connect, exchange ideas, and learn from each other's experiences, fostering a sense of community and adventure.
-
Connect and Explore: Connect with like-minded travelers, exchange ideas, and enhance your sense of community and adventure. Our Travel Partner Finder feature helps you find companions for your journeys.
-
Earn and Redeem: Earn VoyaCoins as you share your travels, which can be spent within the app to purchase packages from partners like Headout and MakeMyTrip. Explore more, share more, and earn more with our exciting platform!
Challenges we ran into
Challenges
During the project we ran into many challenges.
Storing Images
There are many challenges with storing images. As images could be very large, loading a lot of images from firebase made our app very slow and sluggish.
How we solved it
We solved it by compressing the user uploaded images to 2 MB max. We also put loading indicators where ever they were possible to be put.
Regarding fraud detection
This isn't a technical challenge, but still a big issue. Bad actors could upload images, without actually being at the location. We don't have the solution for this problem integrated into our app. But we have ideas that we would do to prevent this problem:
Ideas:
- We put a restriction, that user could only upload photos while they are actually present at that place. We understand, this is an inconvinience for the travellors, but since we are also incentivizing them to upload by giving them chance to make money through affiliate links this would work.
- Implement a verification system where users can earn special "Verified Traveler" badges by visiting and uploading photos from specific locations. These badges could come with additional benefits like increased affiliate earnings or exclusive access to deals. Verified users are more likely to have authentic content.
- We look for anomalies in metadata and user behaviour. We would flag suspicious users and their posts would be depriortized by our reccomendation algorithm.
- Make the sign-up process require more verification, like phone number and email verification, and restricting users to make multiple accounts from one phone.
- Once we get big, we could partner with companies like headout and makemytrip. We would give "Verified Travellor" badge to people, who we could verify that they bought packages from these partners.
Technologies used