Valentina Borovaya's product, StandByStay, addresses a specific gap. Airline staff can fly standby at steep discounts but often don't know which flight they've cleared until they are at the gate, which makes booking a hotel in advance nearly impossible. StandByStay searches every candidate destination in parallel, holds a top pick and a backup in each city and only starts checkout through RouteStack once the traveler confirms the flight. Borovaya built the product with Claude Code.
Second place went to HotelZippo, built by travel technology entrepreneur Varun Jain. The product compresses what can be 30 to 40 hours of research for a family-friendly hotel into a single conversation, synthesizing hundreds of reviews per property into specific guidance and returning one recommendation. When a hotel has an active issue such as ongoing refurbishment, HotelZippo surfaces the warning in red above the top pick. Bookings run through RouteStack's hotel API with webhooks tracking each order from pending to confirmed.
Third place went to MatchRoute, built by Stijn Risseeuw, an computer science and engineering student at TU Delft. MatchRoute moves group trip planning off group chats and spreadsheets into a shared dashboard, where an artificial intelligence assistant helps groups work through budgets, dates and destinations with interactive maps, calendars and voting polls. Once the group aligns, MatchRoute pulls live inventory from RouteStack to generate five tailored trip options.
All three winning products transact through RouteStack, which provides live flight, hotel and rental car inventory with checkout and payouts handled on-platform. Entries were judged by a three-person panel that included Phocuswright senior manager of research and innovation Mike Coletta, with scoring based on real-world usefulness, originality, technical execution and presentation.
"The winning entries make the case better than we could," said Yogesh Kapadne, CTO at RouteStack.
"Three people, working alone, shipped travel products in three weeks that search live inventory and complete real bookings. The supplier contracts, payments and compliance were already in place. They brought the ideas."
The challenge ran June 8 through July 6 and was open to individual developers globally. First place receives a seven-night resort stay and $1,000 in RouteStack API credits. Second place receives a seven-night resort stay and $500 in credits. Third place receives $1,000 in credits. All participants also receive a year of access to a private travel club operated by Custom Travel Solutions, parent company of RouteStack.
Winning products and maker profiles are at routestack.ai/event/build-challenge-win
