What can a single developer build in a matter of hours when given access to live travel inventory, AI and modern APIs?
According to the winners of the inaugural RouteStack Build Challenge, the answer is everything from an intelligent hotel concierge for airline standby passengers to an AI-powered family travel advisor and a collaborative trip-planning platform for groups
Today, RouteStack, the AI-native travel infrastructure developed by Custom Travel Solutions, announced the winners of its global 21-day developer competition, co-sponsored by PhocusWire. The challenge, which ran June 8th through July 6th, invited developers from around the world to build AI travel agents capable of searching live travel inventory and completing real hotel, flight and car rental bookings. Entries were scored by a three-person judging panel on real-world usefulness, originality, technical execution, and presentation.
More than a coding competition, the challenge showcased how quickly AI is reshaping travel technology. Individual developers built fully functioning travel applications that address genuine traveller pain points while demonstrating the growing role of AI agents in commerce
“What’s remarkable isn’t just the quality of the ideas,” said Yogesh Kapadne, CTO of RouteStack. “It’s the speed. In just a few hours many individual developers created AI applications capable of searching live travel inventory and completing bookings using enterprise-grade infrastructure. That demonstrates how AI is dramatically lowering the barriers to innovation across the travel industry.”
Solving Real Travel Problems with AI
First Place: StandByStay
Developed by Valentina Borovaya, a Digital Product Manager at Aer Lingus, StandByStay tackles one of the airline industry’s most frustrating challenges.
Airline staff travelling on standby often don’t know which destination they’ll reach until moments before departure, making hotel booking almost impossible
StandByStay acts as an AI-powered hotel concierge, simultaneously monitoring multiple potential destinations, identifying suitable accommodation and holding preferred hotel options until travellers know which flight they’ve successfully boarded. Once confirmed, the booking is completed through RouteStack
Remarkably, Borovaya built the solution using Claude Code while participating in her very first hackathon
Second Place: HotelZippo
Created by travel technology entrepreneur Varun Jain, HotelZippo reimagines one of the most time-consuming parts of family travel planning
Instead of spending hours comparing hotels and reading hundreds of reviews, travellers simply describe their family and preferences in a conversation with an AI concierge.
The platform analyses guest reviews, highlights issues such as ongoing renovations or unsuitable facilities and recommends the best hotel based on each family’s specific needs before completing the booking through RouteStack’s hotel infrastructure
Third Place: MatchRoute
Built by Stijn Risseeuw, an Honours Computer Science and Engineering student at TU Delft, MatchRoute simplifies one of travel’s biggest frustrations—organising group trips.
The platform combines AI, interactive maps, calendars and collaborative voting tools to help groups agree on destinations, dates and budgets before automatically generating tailored travel itineraries using live hotel, flight and car rental inventory
AI Moves Beyond Planning to Booking
The competition reflects a significant shift taking place across travel technology.
Until recently, generative AI could recommend destinations and suggest itineraries but struggled to complete actual transactions
The winning applications demonstrate how AI agents are now moving beyond inspiration into real-world commerce, allowing travellers to research, compare and book travel within a single conversational experience
This evolution has implications across airlines, hospitality, online travel, financial services and loyalty programmes as businesses increasingly explore how AI can create more personalised, frictionless customer journeys
“The winners didn’t just build clever demos,” Kapadne added. “They built practical solutions that people would genuinely use. That’s where AI becomes transformational—not when it simply answers questions, but when it helps solve real problems.”
Accelerating AI Innovation Across Travel
The RouteStack Build Challenge also highlighted how enterprise infrastructure is enabling faster innovation
Rather than spending months negotiating supplier contracts, integrating payment systems and managing compliance, developers were able to focus entirely on designing customer experiences while RouteStack handled live travel inventory, booking and payment infrastructure.
The result was production-ready AI travel applications delivered in less than a month
Awards
First place received a seven-night resort stay together with $1,000 in RouteStack API
credits
Second place received a seven-night resort stay and $500 in API credits.
Third place receives $1,000 in RouteStack API credits
All participants received a complimentary one-year travel club membership.
The winning applications and developer profiles can be viewed at:
https://www.routestack.ai/event/build-challenge-winners
