THI students develop portal to determine the ideal travel destination

Students of the Technischen Hochschule Ingolstadt (THI) have developed an app that helps each person to determine their individual travel preferences and thus their ideal travel destination. With this idea they won the student start-up competition 5-Euro-Business, which was organized by the Bildungswerk der Bayerischen Wirtschaft (bbw) at the THI.

The four students Melissa Ruppel, Dominik Vetter, Jonas Schlittenbauer, Martin Gädeke and Josef Bley, who had formed the team "swipe away", came out on top among nine teams in the final of the competition. Among other things, the business idea, the business plan and the marketing of the idea were used for evaluation.

The "swipe away" app works intuitively. The user is first shown a series of authentic photos of sights and impressions from around the world. By clicking on the respective photo, the user can now decide on a simple colour scale how much he or she would like to travel to this sight. Finally, a world map provides an overview of the favoured regions as well as tips for booking a trip to these places in the future. This step is to be made even easier through future cooperation with tourist information offices and tour operators.

So far, a prototype of the app exists, which can be accessed at www.swipe-away.de/start. The long-term goal of the students is to use artificial intelligence to suggest suitable trips to users worldwide. In this way, it should also be possible for people who want to travel together to find out the destination with the most matches, which should make holiday planning much easier.