As a team, we wanted to challenge the way people conventionally look at travel websites. Catapult was created as an innovative platform for users to explore possibilities for adventure and travel.
Catapult allows users to fully immerse into the world around them through thousands of instantly generated travel itineraries for cities across the United States.
Catapult utilizes libraries including Selenium, Beautiful Soup, and Flask in the implementation of our own web scraping API and integrates it with the backend of our website.
Some of the challenges we ran into was obtaining a free API that looks for hotels, activities, and restaurants. Another challenge we had was integrating Python in the API implementation and JavaScript in the backend as well as Next.js in the frontend.
An accomplishment we are proud of is the implementation of our own API through web scrapping in response to not finding a free API applicable to our problem. Additionally, we are pleased with the design aesthetic and interactivity of our website.
Although the concept of pulling request from the API to the program between different coding languages was foreign to all group members, we found it extremely rewarding to develop a sufficient understanding and successfully implementing this process.
Catapult is looking forward to scale globally with a larger database and a smarter, more integrated AI to allow users an enhanced experience with travel options from all over the world.