An international hackathon for apps to improve the travel experience of airport passengers has been announced. The hackathon is using data from seven international airports across Europe.

The seven airports supporting the hackathon are Schiphol, Stockholm, Frankfurt, Gatwick, Geneva, Munich and Copenhagen. Each airport supporting the 48 hour hackathon will share APIs, flight and waiting time data with the developers to help with the challenge.

Along with the flight information, developers will get access to partner APIs, specifically SITA and UBER. The SITA iTravel API can be used by developers to access information on booking, check-in, loyalty, baggage tracking, and flight and airline information. The UBER API can be used to pass a destination address to the Uber app, display pickup times, provide fare estimates, and access trip history.

The Hackathon event, which is taking place in Berlin from 16 - 18 June, is similar to previous airport hackathons, but has more international airports than previous challenges.

Developers will be split up into teams and present their ideas to a judging panel, who will award prizes to the winners of each theme. The organizers suggest developers should consider innovative tech solutions. On their website they say:

"The goal of hacking the passenger journey is to realize an efficient, destressed, informed, active, and happy passenger by using new and rising tech solutions like AR/VR, wearables, chatbots, and more!"

The competition is organized into four possible challenges to choose from:

• Challenge 1: Life before the airport
• Challenge 2: Life at the airport
• Challenge 3: Airport transfers
• Challenge 4. Arriving at the destination 

One of the participating airports, Gatwick, recently installed 2000 navigation beacons across its terminals, providing an indoor navigation system which enables augmented reality wayfinding for passengers.

In practical terms, this means once inside the airport you don't have to use Google or Apple maps on your phone, as these can become unreliable indoors. Instead, you can follow a blue arrow on a map of the interior provided by Gatwick's own system. The augmented reality wayfinding tool shows you directions in the camera view of your phone, making it easier to find check-in areas, departure gates and baggage belts. The idea is that in time this will be supported through airport, airline and third-party mobile applications - like those developed in the hackathon, for example.

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