Alright, let’s dive into my little project – building a hotel search engine specifically tailored for families. It was a bit of a rollercoaster, but hey, who doesn’t love a good challenge?
The Idea Spark: It all started when my sister was planning a vacation with her kids. She was pulling her hair out trying to find hotels that had connecting rooms, a decent pool, and, you know, didn’t look like a total dump. That’s when the lightbulb went off – why not create a search engine that actually prioritizes family-friendly amenities?
Phase 1: Data Gathering (The Grunt Work) First things first, I needed data. And lots of it. I started by scraping data from popular travel sites like Booking and Expedia. I know, I know, scraping isn’t always the cleanest way to do things, but hey, gotta start somewhere, right? I used Python with Beautiful Soup and Requests. It was messy, required a lot of tweaking to handle different site structures, and took forever, but eventually, I had a decent dataset of hotels.
Phase 2: Feature Engineering (Making Sense of the Mess) Raw data is useless. I needed to extract meaningful features. This meant identifying keywords like “family rooms,” “kids’ club,” “cribs available,” “babysitting services,” “swimming pool,” etc. I used regular expressions (regex) to scan the hotel descriptions and reviews. This was surprisingly effective, though it did involve a lot of trial and error to avoid false positives (like flagging a hotel as family-friendly just because it mentioned “family-owned”).
Phase 3: Building the Search Engine (The Fun Part) I decided to go with a simple Flask app in Python. I know, it’s not the most scalable solution, but it was quick to set up and perfect for a proof of concept. I used Elasticsearch to index the hotel data and perform the actual search. Elasticsearch is a beast, but once you get the hang of it, it’s incredibly powerful for full-text search and filtering.
Phase 4: Ranking and Filtering (The Tricky Part) This is where things got interesting. I wanted to prioritize hotels with the most relevant family amenities. I created a scoring system that assigned points based on the presence of different features. For example, a hotel with connecting rooms and a kids’ club would get a higher score than a hotel with just a pool. I also added filters for price range, star rating, and user reviews.
Phase 5: UI/UX (Making it Look Decent) I’m no designer, so I kept the UI simple. Just a basic search bar, a list of results, and some filters on the side. I used Bootstrap for the styling, which, let’s be honest, is a lifesaver for developers like me.
The Results (Not Perfect, But Working) The initial results were… mixed. Some hotels were accurately flagged as family-friendly, while others were completely off. The ranking algorithm needed some serious tweaking. I spent a lot of time analyzing the search results, adjusting the scoring system, and adding more filters.
Lessons Learned (The Gold Nuggets)
- Data cleaning is a never-ending process. Seriously, you can never have enough clean data.
- Regex is your friend, but also your enemy. Be careful with those patterns!
- Elasticsearch is awesome, but it has a steep learning curve.
- UI/UX is important, even for a personal project. Nobody wants to use an ugly app.
Next Steps (The To-Do List)
- Improve the data quality. I need to find more reliable data sources.
- Refine the ranking algorithm. It’s still not perfect.
- Add more filters. Users want more control over their search results.
- Make the UI more user-friendly. It’s functional, but not pretty.
Overall, this project was a lot of fun and a great learning experience. I’m not sure if it will ever become a real business, but it’s a solid proof of concept. And hey, at least my sister can now find hotels for her family vacations without wanting to throw her phone against the wall.
