Living With COVID: An Online Hackathon To Solve Problems of Hoteliers and Travellers

Living With COVID: An Online Hackathon To Solve Problems of Hoteliers and Travellers

With travel and hospitality industry badly hit due to the global pandemic and technology poised as a game-changer in the road ahead, TiE Bhubaneswar chapter came together with Bookingjini and EazyDiner to launched an online Hackathon, called JINIHACK, on May 2 with an aim to solve the problems of hoteliers and travellers.

More than 170 young groups of people from 20 states in India entered the competition. The idea behind the concept 'Code and innovate while you isolate'  was to try and seek solutions to contain COVID-19 spread in the Hospitality Industry by automating the hotel check-in process. 

An online hackathon is a marathon for community-based solution-seeking that focuses on hardware, the Internet of Things (IoT), system and protocols.

The three organizations Bookingjini, TiE and EazyDiner invited Students and Tech-professionals to join the hackathon with the hashtag #JINIHACK (hacking from home). They were encouraged to work together, share ideas, manifest ideas and develop prototypes in 48 hours.

For the marathon, participants were categorised into groups and guided by mentors for the 48 hours drive. During this period, they received help from Domain and technology experts from Bookingjini as mentors, all of them volunteered.

Participants proposed solutions to the COVID-19 problems by taking out the Human interaction while check-in, getting a glimpse of the 360-degree view of the rooms during the booking and smoothing the step into the room using an IoT device that can detect mobile app for checking into the hotel.

As the hackathon was held online, the work took place on WhatsApp as the main communication tool, Google Meet for collecting and viewing of video pitches and GITHUB for sending materials.

To put the finalists to test, an expert panel of judges judged the teams on the basis of Live run of the Code, Technical & Financial Feasibility, Business scalability and Presentation Skills through their insightful feedback and rigorous scoring. 

Judges for this Hackathon were Devesh Sinha, Founder & CEO of Cozentus; Kapil Chopra, Founder and CEO of Postcard Hotels and Resorts, Sushant Pandey the CTO of EazyDiner; Smruti Nayak, Co-Founder and Director Technologies of Tatwa Technologies Limited. 

In the end, the judges declared three winning teams on the social media platform.

The team honoured for its solution in the "TAKE OUT THE HUMAN INTERACTION" category was overall JINIHACK winner. This team called Firefly Developers was based in their homes in Coimbatore as they addressed the problem of Human Interaction post COVID using QR codes and Near Field Communication (NFC) Technology for seamlessly checking into the Hotel and by using IOT Machine Learning also for suggesting Menu during the stay.

The lead of the Team Bala Subramaniam says "We are first-year engineering students from different colleges. We have come up with our startup which we kick-started with #JiniHack as our first hackathon. We have made a web and mobile application to automate a Staff-less hotel post the COVID-19 pandemic. We are extremely thankful to our mentors and BookingJini team for giving us an amazing hackathon experience!

The team honoured for its solution in the "GET A GLIMPSE" was "ONE AND ALL". They created an app for getting a glimpse of the entire Hotel with 360 AR Immersive Experience, Real-time and quality Review and Inbuilt Video Call feature. Abhishek Seth, a representative from the Team says, "Our team built an android app that gives users a 360 view of hotel rooms and an inbuilt video calling feature for better interaction. Thank you BookingJini for giving this opportunity and making this lockdown a fun, productive, and memorable experience." 

The team honoured for its solution in the "SMOOTH THE STEP IN" was "DEVSMASH". Mrugank leading the Team says "Imagine an AI bot taking care of all your orders from guests, a chatbot taking orders to book rooms and other services through the app. Everything is possible through our solution we addressed during this 48 hours online hackathon."