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Cover image for My girlfriend likes to travel, I like to know how much it's gonna cost. Vue, node and some APIs later, I give you tripcoster.com

My girlfriend likes to travel, I like to know how much it's gonna cost. Vue, node and some APIs later, I give you tripcoster.com

Chris Dermody on May 25, 2019

After a few weeks work, I'm happy to share tripcoster.com. For me, figuring out where is good value to travel to for a break away has always been...
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cecilelebleu profile image
Cécile Lebleu

Really nice!
I’m on mobile right now so I’ll test it later.
I would like to suggest though something I’ve always wanted to see, which is a visual graph of the cost of traveling somewhere over time. Is it more expensive to travel in May, or in September, or December? In my case, I can literally pick up my things and go at any time, so it would be cool to know if I wait a few weeks it would cost 20% less, for example.
Not sure how it would work though, and it might need a LOT of data... 🤔

I don’t know, just an idea :)

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darksmile92 profile image
Robin Kretzschmar

Yes this is a feature I also would want to see on such a site!

This helps a lot to decide when it would be best to travel to a certain destination.
Also if I set a budget and want to know when I get the best out of it.

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Davs Howard

There's an app called Hopper that shows this. Might be worth checking out :-)

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RM

Google flights has a feature like this, once you typed in your dates and destinations a price graph option shows up that shows you month by month how flight prices change.

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ezerw profile image
Eze Rodriguez

This would be really cool, I was also thinking of doing it but the problem I see is that the price also varies depending when you're making the search. i.e in some airlines is not the same look for a flight on May to flight on September than look for it on July.

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Filip Messa

Nice work 👍,
And is nice too see that someone is use Kiwi.com/Tequila API. I working there, but not not directly on the Tequila but we use the Tequila in my Project Margarita github.com/kiwicom/margarita
We trying to build the example travel business application with cross-platform approach, one code run everywhere. We use for that react-native-web library.

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Chris Dermody

Nice! When I tried to use the web version though it couldn't find "Dublin" - which is where I am.

Looks good though!

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Filip Messa

Thanks,
It is still in progress, but I will check why you can’t find a Dublin. Thanks for find

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ruchinmunjal

I started typing London in From field. It didn't do anything. I then clicked the dropdown to change date to next month and suddenly "dynamic" dropdown appeared under the From field. Had to select the value from the result set for it to process it. Could be a query running in background, but no indication of such (perhaps you can add a UX element to show something is happening??) Looks pretty nice and awesome otherwise.

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Lennart • Edited

Great work! Would fit perfectly for a Hackathon and way beyond. What source(s) did you use for finding the APIs?

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chipd profile image
Chris Dermody

Just google! Also RapidAPI.com. But I knew I needed accommodation and flights, so just searched the web for those APIs!

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Alex

Dude,this is pretty damn cool! Sure not the most advanced app, and not like going on Expedia for instance, but quickly gives me an idea and is perfect for someone like me wanting a quick estimate. Good job, I will legit be using this weekly.

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PlayBossWar

This is really awesome.
If you include more hotels and maybe more flight possibilities I will probably use this as my holiday planner!
Will this be posted on github? Would love to contribute to it.

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chipd profile image
Chris Dermody

I'm not planning on open-sourcing it right now no - I'd like to try and build this into a product that can be used for exactly what you said.

It needs some more work of course - hotels and other accommodation types are definitely needed!

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Przemysław Jabłoński

Really awesome, congrats! Out of curiosity, I was interested in using kiwi api once, but I coudn't find any info on how to enroll and get api keys for my app. You got in touch directly with the team via email or there is some resource I've missed? Thanks!

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chipd profile image
Chris Dermody

You can register at the link below ;)

tequila.kiwi.com/portal/login/regi...

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Przemysław Jabłoński

Amazing, thanks! Keep up the good work!

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Shay Ashkenazi

Nice one!

Another good idea is to use the big mac index to approximate the costs of food and/or drinks at bars. This can be depended on user input regarding its eating/drinking habits when abroad.
Not sure if there is there is an API for this, but you can get the data in other ways.

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chipd profile image
Chris Dermody

Shay thanks for this. I was looking at some APIs for this - definitely something I want to add. Thank you!

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morgana

As one who struggles coming up with project ideas, I think this is a brilliant example of how to come up with an idea - "I do this thing pretty frequently, can I build something to help with it?". It gets the cogs moving in my head.

Nice job and thanks for sharing!

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chipd profile image
Chris Dermody • Edited

Absolutely. ya just gotta keep your eyes open for problems to solve. Only thing is you'll see lots of problems and soon be buried in ideas. But then the fun part of picking the right one starts.

When I was looking for a job I got tired of opening multiple job sites, so I built jobb.ie - a job aggregator for Ireland

When I was getting requests from other people to help them build their developer portfolio, I built mydevportfol.io to help them build their own.

When I wanted a nice container for my instagram posts/vidoes, I built instadev.chrisdermody.com so that I could iframe in a site and record my screen or take a screenshot (this is a WIP).

And that's just the recent ones. ;)

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Yassin Mokni

This is golden advice, man
thanks for the inspiration.

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chipd profile image
Chris Dermody

Of course. It's nice to see an old Post of mine still get some readers 😊

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kaelscion

So this is a databaseless app? I am a huge fan of those and seeing as my wife and I have severe wanderlust, this is certainly an app worth looking into.

Question: you say that the data sources for this are largely APIs and you're main complaint is performance. Have you tried Gatsby? I've begun using it recently and the performance is conesiuer-level. Personally, I'm not a huge fan of plain React (although Gatbsy is built on it), or any other "digital coming of Christ" toolsets and stacks, so I understand if you haven't.

Other question: is this available for contributors? I'm just starting to get more into Node (I'm a long-time Python developer who wants to keep up) and this is the kind of app I would gladly contribute to!

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Chris Dermody

Hey! yep this is databaseless at the moment. Although I think I'm gonna have to bit the bullet on that soon if I want to have some user accounts and the ability to "save" or "watch" a certain trip...

performance wise it's really just the APIs that are slow (specifically the flights) - and there's nothing really I can do about that apart from caching maybe - and even then I don't think it's gonna be that effective.

And no sorry I'm keeping this code private for the moment so it's not open for contribution. Feedback and suggestions are more than welcome though of course! :D

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Chris Watson

Very well done. Can't wait to see how it progresses.

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Chris Dermody

Thanks! I'll be sure to post updates here.

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Shobi

Its a really cool project. A lot to improve, but the first thing is that I would like you to fix the speed. I suppose it's probably a problem with the API, Even after entering the destination, for 5-8 seconds it was stuck, and I felt the site was not working at all.

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Michael Tharrington

This is brilliant!!

Bookmarked and going to test it out with my wife when she arrives back from her trip tomorrow. We're constantly traveling.

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Chris Dermody

Awesome stuff thank you. There are a few bugs, but I'm working on them! And some new features coming like being able to specify your currency (duh). please let me know how you get on

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Codica

That's a great one! Good luck with the further development of the app!

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Chris Dermody

Thank you Codica! :)

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Gift Egwuenu

This is really nice! Great job and I love it and the inspiration behind the project.

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Paul

This is really amazing :o Even works for Serbia

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Chris Dermody

Thanks Paul! It should work for the whole world (in theory) - but I'm sure there are some snags. Let me know if you notice any, pretty please :)

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Paul

No problem, if I notice Im sure I will send feedback, but overall looks amazing, tbh such an amazing work that I find this to be really inspirational to me. Ive gotten my hopes up for new project as soon I have more experience in web dev world

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Yuri Predborskiy

Nice idea! Although, personally, I just use skyscanner to see prices to various countries and pick whatever is cheap to fly to. Then we check hotel prices and attractions. If those are affordable, off we go!

As for databases - you can use it to cache results for certain directions, this may speed up things as soon as you get some data (note that it may change). Over time you'll collect enough data to be able to build price prediction charts and calculate seasonal trends.

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Tony Dehnke

That is slick - could you add local co-works?

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Chris Dermody

Hey Tony. I could try. I wonder is there an API I can ping for that? guessing not but if you know of any please let me know :)

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Tony Dehnke

Looks like Coworker.com does.. I imagine the other might too.. Check it out: coworker.com/api

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chipd profile image
Chris Dermody

niiiice. thanks for this, much appreciated!

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Vikram Sharma • Edited

Nice one Chris. I dabbled with a similar app few months back. The motivation was a list of travel apis I stumbled upon. Somewhere down the way I lost the enthusiasm and the app went to rest in the graveyard of side projects :)

I wish you better luck and God speed.
Ad Astra Per Aspera.

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Prashanth R.

Love this project! Keep up the awesome work 👍

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Chris Dermody

Thank you! I will :)

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Gabriel Magalhães dos Santos

Great job! When the currency tool gonna alive, that will be awesome :)

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Chris Dermody

Thanks! Working on it :)

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Mpho Mphego

Amazing, great project.

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Chris Dermody

Thank you! 🙌🏼

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chaluvadis profile image
Curious to learn new things

Chris, Great work.

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Chris Dermody

Thank you Surendra!

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Snær Seljan Þóroddss

Awesome! Where did you get the autocomplete api?

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chipd profile image
Chris Dermody

That's actually done with Kiwi's endpoints!

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Neat! I'd use this.

I'm running into some bugs when trying to use it now, but I'll be back 🙂

Unsplash seems like a good choice for this project.

Do you cache the APIs or get them live every time?

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Chris Dermody

What are the bugs???

I know there's probably tons but I just had to get it out there and see it in action.

Yeah unsplash is nice - although sometimes ir returns some strange pictures for certain destinations! :D

I'm not caching the responses right now no - I want to cache the flights for a reasonable amount of time - but I also don't want to give wrong data to the user. Flights can change a lot.

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Hugo

Wow, it's really amazing and beautiful, thanks for sharing

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Chris Dermody

Thank you for the kind words! 🙏

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Thabo Pali

This is simply a great app, can't wait to see the finished product.

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Chris Dermody

Thank you! I'm hoping I can post weekly with some cool updates! ☺️

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David Sima

This is a really neat app.

I ❤ it so much.

While it's not perfect yet I'm sure you can improve it. I will probably use this for my next trip.

👏👏👏👏

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chipd profile image
Chris Dermody

That's amazing thank you!

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Robert Wilde

Wow that is an awesome idea and it looks fantastic

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Chris Dermody

Thank you! :)

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Ramón Gallo

Awesome idea. Really useful.
I'm pinning your URL to my browser hoping to see this project on a higher level.

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chipd profile image
Chris Dermody

Awesome stuff, thank you. I'll be improving on it every day, I'm getting some fantastic feedback

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ruchinmunjal • Edited

Idea/Request
Multi-currency support? Would love to see prices in my chosen currency. :)

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chipd profile image
Chris Dermody

Yep absolutely - I actually have that but it's automatic (tries to detect your country and give you the correct currency - but it doesn't always work). Also I need to give users the option to set their own currency...

Thank you for the feedback though!

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Hannah Hyde

This is great! I shared it to my school's slack channel and would love to follow the progress on GitHub.

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Chris Dermody

That's so awesome thank you so much! I don't have the code open source at the moment but I might do that!

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Shahid Kamal Khan

Prices shown are higher than my usual flights. From where you're fetching these?

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Chris Dermody

Shahid sorry for the delayed reply, I must have missed your comment. I'm getting the flights from Kiwi. What source are you usually using??

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Shahid Kamal Khan

I usually use an app called PayTM. I also use sites like MakeMyTrip, Yatra.com etc wherever I find lowest fare.

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Chris Dermody

Thanks!

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sonsolescastro908

Hey!! On guipuzcoaexiste.es you will find anything you could know about Guipuzcoa. Have you ever been there?

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chipd profile image
Chris Dermody

I actually use the Kiwi API for that - it's handy