SITA HACKATHON 2021

Fresh out of an intense 3 day Hackathon – Hack the Normal, I was curious to see what other Hackathons were on DevPost. I spotted the SITA Hackathon and I immediately signed up. That was the best decision I made. I learned so much from the workshops. The insights and the knowledge I gained is priceless. Win or Lose, it was amazing!

About

Using SITA APIs, participants are to create prototypes that fall in any of these categories:

Passenger Experience – with changing priorities of air travel passengers, the industry constantly needs to introduce new solutions and services that will improve the passenger experience and make them feel more at ease while flying.
Cargo & Baggage – COVID has sped up the adoption of digital technologies in cargo and baggage by several years. What out of the box solutions can we further create to boost the digitalization efforts in these areas? Potential areas could be vaccine logistics, sustainability, cost reduction, and tracing.
Airport of the Future – with the ever-changing transportation realm and with airports offering an array of services and retail options, we’re excited to see what participants envision will stay or become a part of the future traveler’s journey.
AI & Data (Open challenge) – this is an open challenge where we’d like to see participants’ creativity and innovation while using the APIs and data sets that are available to them.

Date: 12 – 21 March 2021

Team

For this hackathon, I decided to go solo.

Hackathon Tools

Slack (communication)
Devpost (submissions)
Microsoft Teams (video calls)

Workshops

SITA APIs
Ideation for Aviation Startups
Introduction to UI/UX
Aviation Retail
COVID-19 impact in aviation
How to pitch

What I built and Inspiration

Initially, when I signed up for the hackathon, I wanted to build a travel web app – leverage on one of their APIs and call it a day. When I attended the introductory workshop, it dawned on me I was thinking small and needed to do something better.

The first thing that came to my mind was a newbie traveler who had no idea what to do at the airport. Wouldn’t it be nice for them to have all the information they need on their phone? Checkpoint waiting times, destination weather, what to pack, track baggage, and so on.

Leveraging on SITA APIs, Trippp helps users stay informed and in control at all times. I am not good at writing long stuff so let me just summarize with points:

With the information at signup (name, passport-type), Tripp should help users know what travel documents they need (do they need VISA? Do they need malaria vaccination? etc.)
Generate boarding pass for the passenger
Suggest places to visit (based on their preferences)
Know their flight information – status, gate, scheduled time, terminal, and so on.
While on your flight, you can keep an eye on your baggage – track it.
I also thought about synching the passenger’s biometric data with SITA for each trip. So in airports where biometric boarding is enabled and powered by SITA, users can share their biometric data to have a low-touch/contactless boarding experience. SITA has an app like this so I wasn’t planning on reinventing the wheel.

P.S. I have no inspiration behind the name. It was the first thing that came to my mind