jackjdleslie / scanthesky

Ðapp to facilitate confirmation of bookings redirected from Skyscanner to airline websites

scanthesky (STACSHack 2018)

Ðapp to facilitate confirmation of bookings redirected from Skyscanner to airline websites

Getting Started

You'll need all the files from the repo to run both a webpack dev server and a separate node app

Requirements

• Truffle
• Node / NPM

Migrate contracts

This project assumes truffle develop is used, so to migrate accordingly:

truffle develop

then

migrate

Starting the front-end

To run and serve the front-end on http://localhost:8080:

npm run dev

(note: if you want to simulate being logged in, add a query parameter user_id with the id you want to use - for example http://localhost:8080?user_id=testuser)

Watching for smart contract events

To obtain the data from the emitted smart contract events:

node watch.js

What is it?

The front-end is a simulation of the Skyscanner website redirecting to an external airline provider's website (in this case Ryanair). As the user, you have just chosen a flight deal on Skyscanner's website, and are ready to be redirected to the Ryanair website to book the deal.

From Skyscanner's perspective, after you redirect they don't know whether or not the flight ever gets booked - just that the user was redirected.

How does this fix the problem?

This simulation shows this described situation, except when the user is redirected the booking number and the user id are send to a smart contract to create an unconfirmed booking.

When the user then confirms the booking on Ryanair's end, the booking number, the user id and the airline id (which have been passed via query parameters) are sent to the same smart contract to check if there is an unconfirmed booking with this number, and if there is to mark it as confirmed.

This solves two problems:

1. Skyscanner can now look at the emitted events from the contract, and see when a booking has been confirmed
2. Ryanair can look at the emitted events as well, and see if a certain user has booked with them through Skyscanner before, and if so then how many times

Does this need Ethereum?

It's not the only solution to the problem, however using a smart contract means that:

1. Neither party has to worry about creating an endpoint to query about this data, or worry about storing this data - this is processed and then emitted by the smart contract, which doesn't need to be stored by either party
2. It provides a way to benefit both parties - while at first it would only initially benefit Skyscanner (with seeing confirmed bookings), it also benefits the external airline as they also get access to the smart contract data (as described previously)

In addition to this, the project was created at a hackathon by people who wanted to learn more about smart contract development, as well as tackle a real problem that Skyscanner have.