We’re happy to wrap up 2018 with something we’re extremely proud of — our pilot #HackTravel Hackathon which took place in Prague on October 24–25 during Prague Blockchain Week.

The hackathon, the first of its kind, allowed various airlines, travel companies and blockchain developers to combine their coding solutions in a collaborative effort using Winding Tree’s open source platform. We received 85+ hacker applications, 120+ participants representing 20+ countries, 12 project submissions and tons of fun.

The nature of the #HackTravel hackathon itself was an unprecedented phenomenon — up till now it was hard to imagine that teams from major airlines would sit down and write open source code alongside travel startups, independent developers and industry software vendors. We’re determined to change this industry mindset going forward.

It was the first time that major airlines, developers, and startups worked on solutions together, openly exchanged expertise, gave feedback, contributed to each other’s hacks with fresh perspectives and picked each other’s brain in the spirit of open innovation.

The Travel industry is notorious for being extremely competitive, due to its refusal to collaborate and siloed information. As a result the entire industry has become stagnant. Because the big established players are forced to protect their current profit maintaining technology, the technology is becoming outdated. It is being protected at the cost of innovation. Conventionally, the travel industry has seen only very few collaborative projects, as there is no incentive to create code that will benefit competitors. Many travel startups do not survive past a few years, as the costs of access to data and being at the mercy of the intermediaries are putting them out of business.

The success of the Winding Tree Hackathon shows not only how an open sourced platform will benefit the entire travel ecosystem, but also how it can lead to faster and smarter developments in the space; using what AirFrance-KLM team calls “collective intelligence”.

Project Highlights & Winners

Air France-KLM Team

A truly “get great sh*t done” kind of team — amazing job! “We implemented a first solution to adapt Winding Tree Hotel Architecture to airline business. We integrated calls to the new distribution standard (NDC) API of two airlines : Air France — KLM and Lufthansa. We also developed a search API so that the end-user can make one query on all the airlines that are part of the index.”

Photo credit — AirFrance-KLM team

Siesta Cloud

We’re super excited about this one — we have the first open-source adapter for Winding Tree made by someone other than us. It’s done in .NET and the guys actually successfully used it in their own real-world PMS and booking solution to create hotels and book rooms. Amazing! It probably still needs some polishing, but we are very glad that the reach can be much bigger with an adapter to another technology.

Emergency Shelter (also won the community vote prize)

Hats off — well done & such a brilliant idea! “Across the world, the increasing frequency and intensity of natural and human made disasters in the form of superstorms, earthquakes and wars mean an increasing number of people who are left homeless and in urgent need of emergency shelter.” So the guys worked on a smart contract that allows people to offer their homes as emergency shelter, all built on Winding Tree.

Liquid Ancillaries

Exactly the kind of extension services everyone will benefit from — great job!

“Easily pay for supplements to your accommodation with the help of the liquidity.network after booking with winding-tree.”

We also really like Wipu and their solutions around privates offers, a number of teams worked on similar projects by ATPCO, NuCypherand Sciant teams. Another great hack to mention is by AirPlus team who tackled B2B payments.

You can find all submissions and our more detailed evaluation of the projects here:

Hackathon Tech Talks

We recorded our tech talks as a recap for hackathon participants and our community — check them out, tons of great insights:

Interesting to note is that during the hackathon we discovered that quite few participants had very limited knowledge of Blockchain development or of existing Blockchain based technologies before coming to hackathon. With support from our team and tech mentors all of them were able to successfully complete their hacks and left with tons of new insights and learnings.

What’s Next

We’ll be announcing 2019 hackathons and travel tech meetups in Europe and US shortly. To get your priority invites, signup here.

As part of the hackathon we also organized the first Winding Tree Roundtable for the airlines eager to get together and openly discuss their business goals and needs, technical challenges and expectations for the upcoming Winding Tree airline product. Our goal was to kick off and enable tangible, results oriented collaboration not only with our partners, but to open this kind of opportunity to contribute & shape the future of the platform to a wider network of industry players. Following the roundtable and the feedback we got from the participants, our team has prepared Airline Proof-of-Concept proposal that is public and open for anyone to review — we’re inviting you to take a moment and contribute your feedback and ideas.

The team is already heads down working on the technical evaluation of the Proof-of-Concept architecture and we’ll be updating the community on the roadmap for this product once we complete this technical study and have feasible estimates.

On the hotels front, our hotel platform is ready for our community to test out the booking process while we’re working on improvements and the next version.

Feel like digging deeper and getting more involved?

Development Wiki: good place to start with links to all relevant projects and issues. See here.

Google Group mailing list: this is where you will get any important platform news and technical announcements, fresh from the oven and directly from our developer team. Join the group here.

Gitter Chat: this is where you can talk to our developer team directly. The default chat is public, but you can ping us if you want to discuss anything or have questions and we’ll jump into a private chat with you. Join the chat here.

Platform Improvements Proposals: this is your source of insights about what we’re working on to improve the platform. Check proposals here.

Developer Updates on Medium: sub-section of our blog where we regularly publish platform development overviews, roadmap updates and weekly development progress. See here.