In the last few years, sharing economy platforms have become popular in different fields, especially in hospitality. These platforms enable cutting down the middle man in the supply chain process and making transactions directly between the supplier and customer (peer-to-peer) that results in providing products/services with low prices and convenience, that a reason behind the popularity of these platforms. Airbnb is one of the popular sharing economy platforms that operate in more than 200 countries. It allows millions of people (hosts) to invest in unused spaces by renting them to millions of guests. Airbnb reduces the cost of properties between 30% to 60% compared to hotels. Furthermore, the customer can filter the properties based on the price range, location and a wide range selection of property types (entire apartment, entire home, in-suite bedroom). Moreover, Airbnb provides the user with more customization options enabling the user to find a property that meets all the criteria that the user need. For example, the user could select a property based on the host language, interest or property amenities. Furthermore, Airbnb’s revenue increases year by year. In 2018, the total revenue of Airbnb was 3.6 billion U.S dollars which increased by 31% in the following year.
Even though the Airbnb platform provides helpful information about the property itself and its host, it does not provide information about nearby places (caf´es, restaurants, public transportation, activities) or information about how often crime occurs in the neighborhood of the property. This information is important as it could strongly affect the user decision of selecting a place to stay. This project aims to build a new web application that is going to solve these problems by creating a more in-depth property exploratory experience. In particular, this system is called Travel Guide, it would enable the users to analyze properties, but also venues within London, giving them more historical information about those properties as well as being able to explore different activates or venues that exist nearby. It would also provide overlies of information that allows the user to have broader information about the city such as crime rates, information about useful locations like embassies. In this way, the Travel Guide system will provide more effective information than Airbnb does currently that help the users to decide where to stay.
Here is a video to show you how to run the application. https://youtu.be/2Ig8K0JOcRY
1- First of all, you need to install the packages in “requirements.txt”.
2- Download the TravelGuide database from https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JZO_RlecxiEm7b142jmaH6N4zSjau1h1/view?usp=sharing
3- store the TravelGuide database file in the “DataSource” directory.
4- Run the “index.py” file.
5- Click on the link that occurs in the output section.
6- Next, when the web page runs, set your criteria by selecting the neighbourhood, property type, number of bedrooms, and set price range (min and max).
7- Then, when the properties markers appear on the map, click on one of them to show the pop-up with summary information about the property.
8- To navigate to the property page, you should click on the listing link in the pop-up.
9- After that, a property page will open in a new tap. To navigate to the property page Airbnb website, click on the “Click to see it in Airbnb” button.
10- To check the nearby places and transportation, you should scroll down on the property page and click on one of the buttons.
11- To filter the food venues based on your diet type, click on one of these buttons (Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner or café). Then you will be navigated to a page with a drop-down list, from this list select your diet type or any type.
12- To reach the embassy information go to the map page then select the country from the Embassy info drop-down list.