TravelMate

TravelMate is an AI-powered travel companion for exploring Sri Lanka. Describe what you are looking for—beaches, temples, wildlife, adventure—and get personalized destination recommendations powered by review data and natural-language matching. Browse locations by city and type, read top traveler reviews, and discover places across the island.

Tech Stack

Layer	Technologies
Frontend	React 18, React Router, Vite
Backend API	Python, FastAPI, Uvicorn
Recommendations	scikit-learn (TF-IDF + cosine similarity), pandas
Database	PostgreSQL (psycopg2 in Python, pg in Node)
Data import	Node.js (csv-parser) — seeds DB from Reviews.csv
Deployment	Render (API + static site), Vercel (frontend)

Prerequisites

• Node.js 18+ (for frontend and data import script)
• Python 3.12+
• PostgreSQL (local instance or a hosted provider such as Neon)

Local Setup

1. Clone and configure environment

From the project root, create a .env file:

# PostgreSQL (used by the Python API locally)
DB_HOST=localhost
DB_USER=postgres
DB_PASSWORD=your_password
DB_NAME=travelmate
DB_PORT=5432

# Frontend → API URL (Vite reads env from project root)
VITE_API_BASE_URL=http://localhost:8000

For the data import script (npm run import), set the same connection details under NEON_DB_* (the script expects these variable names):

NEON_DB_HOST=localhost
NEON_DB_USER=postgres
NEON_DB_PASSWORD=your_password
NEON_DB_NAME=travelmate
NEON_DB_PORT=5432

2. Create the database and tables

createdb travelmate
psql -d travelmate -c "
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS locations (
  id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
  name VARCHAR(255) UNIQUE NOT NULL,
  city VARCHAR(255),
  type VARCHAR(255)
);

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS reviews (
  id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
  location_id INTEGER REFERENCES locations(id),
  user_id VARCHAR(255),
  rating INTEGER,
  title TEXT,
  text TEXT,
  published_date TIMESTAMP
);
"

3. Backend

cd backend
pip install -r requirements.txt
npm install
npm run import    # loads Reviews.csv into PostgreSQL (run once)
python3 app.py    # API at http://localhost:8000

The API serves:

• GET / — health check
• GET /locations — destinations grouped by city
• GET /location-types — destinations grouped by type
• GET /reviews?location_name=... — top reviews for a place
• POST /recommend — AI recommendations from natural-language preferences

Interactive docs: http://localhost:8000/docs

4. Frontend

In a second terminal:

cd frontend
npm install
npm run dev

The app opens in your browser (default Vite dev server). It talks to the API via VITE_API_BASE_URL.

Project Structure

TravelMate/
├── backend/          # FastAPI app, ML recommender, DB access, CSV import
│   ├── app.py
│   ├── recommender.py
│   ├── vectorizer.py
│   ├── details.py
│   └── Reviews.csv
├── frontend/         # React + Vite SPA
│   └── src/
├── render.yaml       # Render deployment config
└── vercel.json       # Vercel frontend config

Features

• Discover — preference-based AI recommendations (TF-IDF over review text)
• Places — browse Sri Lankan destinations by city and category
• Reviews — top-rated traveler reviews per location
• About & Contact — project info and contact form

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Please open an issue or submit a pull request.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.