Fantrotter

In 2010 the travel industry still had not been dominated by Google and Kayak was the champion of booking data. The entry fee for realtime flight database was quite steep. but having worked together at Oktane, my partner and I decided to embark on a data driven search app that wins you over with the simple and direct interface and the connection to travel planning and booking sites like Rome2Rio and Seatgeek.

After travelling together a friend of mine pitched me his startup idea. A search engine that helps you quickly plan trips to see your favorite bands and sporting events. We'd get paid through affiliate links that were the lifeblood of the online hotel and travel booking industry. The sell to bands and teams was a cut of the revenue from folks booking travel after visiting their offical site or facebook page. Through cookies, the affiliate cut would go to the affiliate who'd the user had last visited before booking. For the first time ever touring bands had the ability to make money from their fan's travel budgets. The saerch engine also ensured a very expensive userbase. One willing to spend to have fun.

The User Interface was a simple search box that automatically guesses who you mean to search for. The results are an actionable sortable list with realtime links to book flight, hotels, cars and tickets through our affiliate providers. We could offer a quick search with no ads along the way. The site pulled in a number of features from Rome2Rio and Roadtrippers as well as Seatgeek and Ticketmaster. It was built to be modular and fit iframe and Facebook App form factors. We brand the search with the band or sports team.

We build Fantrotter as a desktop, mobile and Facebook app with 3 step automatic installation onto a band's facebook page and embeddable iframe version for their officla site. The app was built with Ruby on Rails, for the JSON API and a CanJS frontend. We used Postgres for long term and Redis for cache storage and Heroku for hosting. We gathered data on travel by utilizing many data APIs that autofetch and colilate data across sources using a batch job system on the backend. That way our searches could be sub second on a smaller dataset than while offering the realtime accuracy and trending capabilities of a the larger full sports, music, flight, hotel and car rental datasets.