Multi-City Travel Routing Tool: Reducing Travel Costs and Time Spent Planning using APIs

Abstract

Travel planning is a time-consuming and ever-changing problem that can diminish the travel experience and greatly increase expenditure, if not done correctly. It is important to have an easy travel planning experience so you can enjoy the travel experience more and not waste time where it is not needed. This thesis aims to minimize the costs and time spent on travel planning using APIs and simple optimization models, creating a travel planning tool. This travel planning tool was developed in Java with the main API being Amadeus, this was combined with a greedy best-permutation heuristic to create the main route optimization function. Fixer.io was an API used to convert currency, and a database caching system was created to decrease the total amount of API pulls consumed. The average travel costs for a user-input travel itinerary that was put into the tool received an 11% average reduction in costs. There is currently no application or website dedicated to optimizing your travel route to decrease the cost of flights. This tool can be developed to fill that gap, helping users decrease the amount of time and money spent on travel planning