This project aims to beat the best adventurer I know with the best name: Jules Verne. His book "Around the World in 80 Days" chronicles a fictional around-the-world trip on a bet that Phileas Fogg and Passepartout complete it in 80 days. Let's beat them at their game!
I'll help come up with an around-the-world trip path based on your selected features like sentiment and interests; you just be an adventurer and find something to bet on.
First and foremost, it's fun! Travel recommendations are somewhat of a dated art; travel agencies have largely been replaced by Google in this interwebbed and globally-minded world. However, personalizing travels is still a great interest for the most individualistic modern population with the most autonomy the history has ever seen. This is my attempt at tailoring unique travels and experiences for you.
- reviews from tripadvisor.com
- At first, I requested access to their API, but they never got back to me. So, I relied on webscraping to build my dataset from scratch. The resulting 1M+ customer reviews of attractions around the globe are stored in a private AWS S3 bucket.
- GIS data of local attractions, i.e. the exact geographical locations of each attraction.
- Webscraped tripadvisor.com using
requestandBeautifulSoup - GIS data: publicly available
- Natural Language Processing to extract features like sentiment, local attractions, characteristics, etc. Namely, I used spark's LDA.
- Monte Carlo Metropolis algorithm to add some randomness.
For detailed implementation, take a look at README.md in src folder.
- Show friends and others, and ask them to evaluate. (I still have the survey scores, and it was around 4 / out of 5!)
The project used to be deployed as a webapp: http://outrunjulesverne.com/. However, the URL is no longer active. For how it used to look, please view this presentation. But as a quick look, here's an example of selected features:
And one example of an output path around the world is:
And along the way, you'll see these beauties of the world:
This app may come back in the near future :]. I really enjoyed this project, and hope you did too. Welp, at least maybe inspire a grand trip.