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Problem Statements

Eight problem statements under Hospitality & Travel. Pick a PS ID, read the brief, and build.

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PS ID - 1

Hospitality Resource Exchange — Smart B2B Marketplace for Shared Resources

Problem Statement

Hospitality businesses such as hotels, restaurants, caterers, banquet venues, resorts, and event organizers frequently experience a resource mismatch. A business may have unused banquet space, parking capacity, vehicles, kitchen capacity, furniture, audio-visual equipment, or other resources, while another business may require the same resource for a limited period. Currently, discovering and accessing such resources is often dependent on personal contacts, phone calls, WhatsApp groups, brokers, or repeated enquiries. Businesses may have difficulty knowing what is available nearby, when it is available, what it costs, and whether it meets their specific requirements. This can result in underutilized assets, unnecessary rental or procurement costs, last-minute shortages, and inefficient resource management.

Hackathon Challenge

Design and prototype a B2B hospitality resource exchange platform that enables businesses to efficiently discover, share, request, and coordinate hospitality resources with other businesses. The platform should support both sides of the marketplace: Resource Providers should be able to: List available resources with details such as type, quantity, capacity, location, availability, pricing, and applicable conditions. Define when a resource is available and prevent conflicting bookings. Receive and manage requests from other businesses. Accept, reject, or negotiate requests based on their requirements. Resource Seekers should be able to: Search or post requirements for specific resources. Specify requirements such as quantity, location, date/time, budget, capacity, and other constraints. Discover and compare available resources from multiple providers. Submit requests and track their status through fulfilment. The solution should address practical challenges such as real-time availability, scheduling conflicts, location and distance, pricing, quantity, resource compatibility, minimum rental periods, transportation/logistics, and request prioritization. Teams can explore intelligent matching and recommendation mechanisms that rank potential resources or suppliers based on factors such as price, distance, availability, suitability, urgency, and business preferences. The platform may also incorporate features such as business profiles, ratings and reviews, quotation requests, negotiation, notifications, booking calendars, transaction tracking, resource utilization analytics, and dashboards. The challenge is open-ended: teams should determine how technology can make B2B resource discovery and sharing faster, more transparent, and operationally efficient, while creating value for both resource providers and businesses seeking resources.
PS ID - 2

Travel Disruption Recovery Engine — Intelligent Travel Resilience

Problem Statement

Modern travel consists of interconnected bookings such as flights, trains, hotels, transfers, tours, activities, and events. A disruption in one component can create a ripple effect across the rest of the itinerary. A delayed flight may result in a missed transfer and hotel check-in, while a cancelled activity may require changes to transportation and the day's schedule. Travelers currently have to manually identify affected bookings, check cancellation or refund policies, search for alternatives, calculate additional costs, and rearrange their remaining plans. This becomes even more difficult when disruptions occur during an ongoing trip or when multiple components are affected simultaneously.

Hackathon Challenge

Design and prototype an intelligent travel disruption recovery platform that understands a traveler's complete itinerary, identifies the impact of disruptions, and helps create alternative recovery plans. The solution should support different disruption scenarios such as transport delays or cancellations, missed connections, hotel or activity cancellations, transfer failures, weather-related disruptions, and traveler-initiated changes. The platform should: Represent the trip as a connected itinerary, identifying relationships and dependencies between bookings. Identify direct and downstream impacts when a disruption occurs. Generate multiple feasible recovery options by considering availability, timing, cost, refunds, cancellation policies, location, and traveler preferences. Allow travelers to compare recovery plans based on cost, time, convenience, and the amount of itinerary affected. Update the itinerary after a recovery option is selected. Provide proactive recommendations or warnings for connections or activities that may be at risk. Teams may use AI, recommendation systems, optimization, graph-based approaches, or rule-based intelligence to improve disruption detection and recovery planning. The challenge is open-ended: teams should explore how technology can transform travel disruption management from a manual, stressful process into an intelligent and personalized recovery experience.
PS ID - 3

GroupTrip Ledger — Multi-Vendor Group Travel Coordination & Settlement

Problem Statement

Group travel involving friends, families, student groups, or corporate teams often involves multiple travelers, vendors, bookings, and payment arrangements. Not every participant joins every activity, some people share rooms or transportation, and payments may be made by different members on behalf of the group. As the trip evolves, changes such as participants joining or leaving, activity changes, partial cancellations, booking modifications, refunds, or additional expenses can make it difficult to determine who participated in what, who has already paid, who owes money, and how costs should be fairly distributed. Currently, this coordination is often managed through spreadsheets, chat groups, payment apps, and manual calculations, resulting in confusion, duplicate payments, settlement errors, and lack of a clear financial view of the trip.

Hackathon Challenge

Design and prototype a group travel coordination and settlement platform that provides a unified view of the group's itinerary, bookings, participants, and finances. The platform should allow organizers to: Create a master group itinerary covering transportation, accommodation, activities, and other bookings. Add participants and define which travelers are part of each booking or activity. Manage shared and individual expenses across different vendors. Record payments made by different participants and track outstanding amounts. Automatically recalculate individual shares when participants join, leave, or modify their activities. Handle cancellations, refunds, booking changes, and additional expenses while maintaining an accurate financial record. Provide each participant with a personal itinerary and payment summary, along with a complete group-level financial view. The solution should support different cost-sharing models such as equal split, participant-based split, shared-room allocation, activity-based payment, or organizer-paid expenses. Teams may use AI or intelligent algorithms to identify inconsistent bookings, suggest cost-saving options, recommend suitable group arrangements, or optimize how shared expenses are distributed. The challenge is open-ended: teams should explore how technology can make group travel planning, coordination, expense management, and final settlement transparent, flexible, and stress-free, even when the group and itinerary change throughout the trip.
PS ID - 4

Smart Resort 360 — AI-Powered Resort Operations, Guest Experience & Revenue Intelligence

Problem Statement

Modern resorts need to balance three interconnected priorities: efficient operations, exceptional guest experiences, and sustainable revenue growth. However, information related to room occupancy, staff availability, maintenance, inventory, guest requests, preferences, pricing, and feedback is often spread across different systems and processes. This makes it difficult for resort managers to obtain a real-time understanding of operations, anticipate problems, personalize guest services, allocate resources efficiently, and make timely revenue decisions.

Hackathon Challenge

Design and prototype an AI-powered resort intelligence solution that uses operational and guest data to improve one or more aspects of resort operations, guest experience, or revenue management. Teams may focus on challenges such as: Intelligent staff scheduling based on occupancy, workload, and staff availability. Predictive maintenance to identify potential equipment or facility failures before they affect guests. Inventory optimization for food, housekeeping, and other resort resources. Personalized guest experiences based on preferences, booking information, and behavior. AI concierge for handling guest requests and recommending resort services or activities. Guest sentiment analysis from reviews and feedback to identify service issues and improvement areas. Dynamic pricing and revenue optimization based on demand, occupancy, seasonality, and other relevant factors. Guest segmentation to identify different customer groups and support targeted services or offers. The solution should go beyond simply displaying data. It should demonstrate how AI, analytics, or intelligent automation can convert resort data into actionable recommendations, predictions, alerts, or automated workflows. Teams may focus on a single high-impact problem or combine multiple interconnected areas to create a broader resort decision-support platform. The challenge is open-ended, allowing teams to determine how technology can help a resort operate more efficiently, provide more personalized guest experiences, utilize resources better, and improve revenue.
PS ID - 5

Green & Inclusive Travel — Smart Sustainable and Accessible Hospitality

Problem Statement

The travel and hospitality industry is increasingly challenged to reduce its environmental footprint while making travel more accessible and inclusive. Travelers often have to choose between options based on price, time, and convenience, without clear information about their environmental impact or whether a destination, accommodation, transportation option, or experience meets their accessibility needs. Similarly, hotels, resorts, restaurants, and other hospitality businesses may have opportunities to reduce energy consumption, water usage, food waste, transportation impact, and resource wastage, but lack intelligent tools to identify and prioritize these opportunities.

Hackathon Challenge

Design and prototype a smart sustainability and accessibility platform that helps travelers and hospitality businesses make more environmentally responsible, accessible, and practical decisions. The solution may address one or more areas such as: Green travel recommendations that suggest lower-impact transportation or itinerary options. Carbon-impact estimation for transportation, accommodation, and travel activities. Sustainable accommodation discovery based on environmental practices and resource efficiency. Smart mobility planning that considers public transport, walking, cycling, shared mobility, and other alternatives. Resource optimization for hotels and resorts, including energy, water, food, and other resources. Waste reduction through intelligent monitoring, prediction, or recommendations. Accessible travel planning based on mobility, visual, hearing, or other accessibility requirements. Inclusive experience discovery that helps travelers identify suitable destinations, hotels, transportation, and activities. Sustainability-aware recommendations that balance environmental impact with cost, travel time, comfort, and convenience. Teams may use AI, data analytics, recommendation systems, optimization, or predictive models to estimate impact, identify opportunities, personalize recommendations, or suggest better alternatives. The challenge is open-ended: teams should explore how technology can make travel greener, more accessible, and more inclusive without compromising practicality, affordability, or traveler experience.
PS ID - 6

Local & Experiences — Intelligent Local Discovery & Experience Platform

Problem Statement

When travelers visit a new destination, they often want to experience more than popular tourist attractions. They may be interested in local food, cultural experiences, festivals, workshops, adventure activities, hidden places, local events, shopping, nightlife, or experiences hosted by local communities. However, discovering these experiences is often difficult because information is spread across different websites, social media platforms, booking portals, review platforms, and local listings. The challenge becomes more complex because travelers have different interests, budgets, schedules, group sizes, accessibility requirements, and travel preferences. A traveler may have only three hours available, a family may be looking for child-friendly activities, or a visitor may want experiences within a particular budget and distance from their hotel. Generic search and recommendation platforms often do not consider all these factors together. At the same time, local restaurants, tour operators, activity providers, artists, event organizers, guides, and small businesses may struggle to reach travelers who are genuinely interested in their offerings. Many local experiences remain difficult to discover even when they are highly relevant to visitors.

Hackathon Challenge

Design and prototype an intelligent local discovery and experience platform that connects travelers with relevant local experiences while helping local businesses and experience providers reach the right customers. The platform should create a personalized discovery experience where travelers can search or receive recommendations based on who they are, where they are, what they like, how much time they have, how much they want to spend, and what they are already planning to do. The solution should consider factors such as: Traveler interests and preferences, Current or planned location, Available time, Budget, Distance and travel time, Experience availability, Opening hours, Ratings and reviews, Group size and traveler type, Accessibility requirements and Existing itinerary For example, instead of simply showing a list of restaurants or activities, the platform could understand that a family has two hours available near their hotel and wants an affordable local food and cultural experience, and recommend suitable options that can realistically fit within that time. The system should also be capable of adapting recommendations when circumstances change. For example, if an activity becomes unavailable, weather conditions change, the traveler has less time than expected, or their budget changes, the platform could suggest suitable alternatives. Teams may use AI, recommendation systems, location intelligence, personalization, data analytics, or conversational interfaces to improve discovery and planning. On the provider side, the platform may allow local businesses and experience providers to create listings, manage availability, define offerings, understand traveler preferences, and promote relevant experiences. The goal is to build a solution that moves beyond traditional search-and-list platforms and creates a more intelligent connection between travelers looking for meaningful local experiences and local businesses looking for relevant customers.
PS ID - 7

Personalized Dynamic Tour Planning & Tour Operations Platform

Problem Statement

Traditional tour operators typically offer pre-designed packages with fixed destinations, hotels, transportation, activities, schedules, and pricing. While such packages simplify tour management, they provide limited flexibility for travelers who have different interests, budgets, travel durations, accommodation preferences, activity choices, and preferred travel styles. Modern travelers increasingly expect to customize their journeys rather than simply select from predefined packages. At the same time, delivering personalized tours creates significant operational challenges for tour operators. They need to coordinate customers, hotels, transportation providers, activity vendors, tour coordinators, payments, schedules, group participants, and itinerary changes. When a traveler modifies a requirement or an unexpected situation occurs during the journey, operators may need to manually coordinate multiple stakeholders and update several parts of the itinerary, making the process inefficient and difficult to manage.

Hackathon Challenge

Design and prototype a personalized and dynamic tour planning and operations platform that connects travelers and tour operators through a single system and supports the complete lifecycle of a customized tour. The platform should allow travelers to define their destination preferences, travel dates, duration, budget, accommodation preferences, transportation choices, interests, activities, and preferred travel style, and then create and customize their own tour rather than being restricted to a fixed package. Travelers should be able to explore destinations and experiences, select and modify different components of their trip, compare alternatives, view estimated costs, receive an optimized itinerary, complete bookings, and access their complete travel plan. The platform should also provide tour operators with a centralized environment to manage the operational side of personalized tours, including customers, bookings, vendors, hotels, transportation, activities, payments, tour groups, coordinators, schedules, and itinerary changes. The system should provide visibility into both the customer-facing journey and the operator-facing operations, allowing operators to efficiently manage multiple customized tours and coordinate the different service providers involved. A key aspect of the challenge is dynamic tour management. Travel plans can change before or during a tour because of traveler preferences, availability issues, cancellations, delays, weather, or other unexpected situations. The platform should be able to identify the impact of such changes and help travelers or operators modify the itinerary while considering factors such as cost, availability, timing, location, dependencies, and traveler preferences. Teams may use AI, recommendation systems, optimization, conversational interfaces, or intelligent automation to provide personalized destination and activity recommendations, generate and optimize itineraries, manage budgets, detect conflicts, suggest alternatives, and provide assistance during the journey. The complete journey can be represented as: Discover → Personalize → Plan → Price → Book → Prepare → Operate → Assist → Adapt → Complete → Review The challenge is to demonstrate how technology can help tour operators move beyond fixed-package tourism toward a more personalized, flexible, and dynamically managed travel experience, while giving operators the operational visibility and control required to manage the entire tour lifecycle.
PS ID - 8

Mega-Event Hospitality Orchestration — Intelligent Capacity & Crowd Management

Problem Statement

When a city hosts a mega-event such as a major conference, national sports tournament, large concert, festival, or religious gathering, thousands or even millions of visitors may arrive within a short period. This sudden demand can put significant pressure on hotels, short-term accommodation, transportation, restaurants, venues, and other local services. These resources are often managed independently, making it difficult for event organizers, hospitality providers, and city authorities to understand the overall situation. Certain areas may become overcrowded while accommodation remains available elsewhere, transportation networks may experience severe congestion, and travelers may struggle to find suitable accommodation or efficient routes. Lack of coordinated information can result in capacity shortages, uneven crowd distribution, higher costs, operational bottlenecks, and a poor visitor experience.

Hackathon Challenge

Design and prototype an intelligent event-driven hospitality orchestration platform that helps coordinate accommodation, transportation, and visitor movement during periods of extreme or sudden demand. The platform should bring together relevant information about accommodation availability, transportation capacity, event schedules, visitor demand, locations, and crowd movement to provide a consolidated view of the event ecosystem. It should help identify areas approaching capacity, predict potential congestion or resource shortages, and support better distribution of visitors across the destination. The solution should consider scenarios such as hotel saturation, transportation congestion, sudden demand spikes, venue capacity limits, last-mile connectivity, uneven visitor distribution, and changes in event schedules. It should help event organizers and hospitality stakeholders understand where pressure is building and take appropriate actions before the situation becomes critical. Teams may develop intelligent mechanisms to recommend alternative accommodation zones, optimize attendee movement, suggest alternative transportation routes, predict crowd and capacity patterns, recommend off-peak travel, or provide incentives to distribute demand across less congested areas. AI, predictive analytics, optimization, recommendation systems, or simulation techniques may be used to support these decisions. The platform may provide different experiences for different stakeholders, such as a command and decision-support interface for event organizers and hospitality operators, along with a planning and guidance interface for attendees. The challenge is to demonstrate how technology can transform fragmented event and hospitality operations into a coordinated, data-driven system that anticipates demand, balances available capacity, reduces localized bottlenecks, and improves the overall experience for visitors and service providers during major events.
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