Project linkDevelopment status - Very active
pre-alpha
LayoverFinder is a web project focused on discovering flight routes with practical layovers and better travel options.
What it does
- Lists all the airports in the world with their destinations
- Finds the possible routes between two airports/metro-areas, with the amount of stops the user provides (and has some cool other filters)
- Has an overview of what airline flies that route on what days of the week
Why I built it
I travel quite a lot between Europe and the United States. Most flights that I take are with a layover, as direct can be pretty expensive, and I don’t mind the extra travel time. With that in mind I thought - why not figure out if I can stop a bit longer in the layover city, and enjoy it for a bit? A so-called stopover is perfect for exploring new places.
However, I could not find a tool where I could easily find where I could even stop - that was either free or affordable. I don’t mind paying a small fee (under 10$/€/£), but all the tools I could find were either hard to read, expensive, ridden with ads (and annoying popups!) or did not have correct information. I use Google Flights for every booking and manually typing where I wanted to go everytime is also far from ideal.
With all that in mind, I built LayoverFinder.com.
How it works
How it works is a two-sided question - I can ramble about the techstack, or about how the app actually works. Let’s do both.
Functional description
If you open the app, you are greeted by a massive map with a lot of dots. Every dot is an airport - the color code legend is on the bottom left. You can go two directions here: choose an airport to see its destinations, or type a route you are looking for. After clicking an airport, you can click another airport that is connected to show the route.
Technical description
The stack is quite simple: the data is stored in Supabase
Next steps
I’ve got a long list of features I still want to add - this app can be extremely powerful, which needs some development time. It’s a work in progress and development is very active - meaning bugs can occur fast. The update-log can be found in the settings menu.
A few of the items I want to add:
- Full schedule support (think flighttimes, flightnumbers, etc)
- Add ticketprices support. Ticket prices change rapidly and are hard to obtain, so this one might be difficult, but is for me one of the deciding factors for booking a flight.
- Design a mobile version and even release it as an app. I do not have any experience in building native apps, but I would love to learn.
Next to developing, I also want to focus on getting the app ‘marketed’. If you have any ideas or tips, let me know at info@steynguelen.com.