Overview

HotelBot Andrew is an SMS bot that will help users search for nearby hotels.

At its core, a user can text Andrew to search for nearby hotels and it will respond with a short list of possibilities. From text messages, it is able to extract both core criteria, such as the city and dates of arrival, and other criteria that the user may optionally provide, such as the duration of stay, minimum rating (in terms of stars), and maximum price. Utilizing the allmyles API - for this prototype, just the staging or development version - Andrew then finds up to 30 matching hotels, returning them to the user in sets of 3. (Think Google searches: a search returns thousands or millions of results, but only 10 are displayed at once.)

From here, the user can request to see images, descriptions, and links for each of the returned hotels - or see the next set of 3 results. All resources are delivered in-text, e.g. images are embedded as an MMS instead of linked to. Some advanced features that were originally proposed did not make it into this final project.

However, as it is Andrew is a useful bot for travellers who need to scout out potential places to stay at in the future, intended as a more lightweight and natural alternative to other hotel search apps or sites. Importantly, Andrew is a bot for looking for hotels, not booking them. While Andrew could be extended to provide booking functionality, as is supported by the allmyles API, care would have to be taken so that booking is reliable and secure; this would be a direction for future work.

Features

The following matrix is a copy of one given in the project proposal, categorizing desired features in terms of their priority towards a working bot and their effort to implement. Features marked (D) are done, those marked (N) were not implemented, and those marked (C) could not be implemented due to API restrictions.