Valentina Borovaya of Aer Lingus Wins Custom Travel Solutions’ First ‘RouteStack Build Challenge’
- Joe Breitfeller
- Jul 29
- 3 min read
Custom Travel Solutions has announced the winners of their first global ‘RouteStack Build Challenge.’ Valentina Borovaya, a Digital Product Manager at Aer Lingus, won first place for her ‘StandByStay’ booking solution for airline staff traveling on standby.
On Monday (July 27, 2026), RouteStack, the AI-native travel infrastructure developed by Custom Travel Solutions, announced the winners of its global 21-day developer competition, co-sponsored by PhocusWire. The challenge, which ran June 8th through July 6th, invited developers from around the world to build AI travel agents capable of searching live travel inventory and completing real hotel, flight and car rental bookings. Entries were scored by a three-person judging panel on real-world usefulness, originality, technical execution, and presentation. The results demonstrate just how quickly developers can now build production-ready AI travel applications using modern AI coding tools and enterprise travel infrastructure. The challenge asked developers worldwide to build AI travel agents capable of searching live travel inventory and completing real hotel, flight and car rental bookings.
The winning application was ‘StandByStay’, developed by Valentina Borovaya, a Digital Product Manager at Aer Lingus. The unique application tackles one of the airline industry’s most frustrating challenges. Airline personnel traveling on standby often don’t know which destination they will reach until moments before departure, often making hotel booking almost impossible. StandByStay acts as an AI-powered hotel concierge, simultaneously monitoring multiple potential destinations, identifying suitable accommodation, and holding preferred hotel options until travelers know which flight they’ve successfully boarded. Once confirmed, the booking is completed through RouteStack. Remarkably, Borovaya built the solution using Claude Code while participating in her very first hackathon.
RouteStack is the AI-native travel commerce infrastructure built by Custom Travel Solutions. Developed with over 30 years of enterprise travel technology experience, RouteStack enables developers, enterprises and AI platforms to access live inventory from more than 950 airlines, 3 million hotel properties and 20,000 rental car models through a single API and MCP endpoint. The platform manages payments, merchant-of-record services and commission payouts, allowing developers to build AI-powered travel applications without the complexity of traditional travel integrations.
In Monday’s announcement, RouteStack’s Chief Technology Officer, Yogesh Kapadne, said,
“What’s remarkable isn't just the quality of the ideas, it’s the speed. In just a few hours many individual developers created AI applications capable of searching live travel inventory and completing bookings using enterprise-grade infrastructure. That demonstrates how AI is dramatically lowering the barriers to innovation across the travel industry. The winners didn't just build clever demos. They built practical solutions that people would genuinely use. That's where AI becomes transformational—not when it simply answers questions, but when it helps solve real problems.”
The second place winner, ‘HotelZippo,’ was created by travel technology entrepreneur Varun Jain. HotelZippo reimagines one of the most time-consuming parts of family travel planning. Instead of spending hours comparing hotels and reading hundreds of reviews, travelers simply describe their family and preferences in a conversation with an AI concierge. The platform then analyzes guest reviews, highlights issues such as ongoing renovations or unsuitable facilities, and recommends the best hotel based on each family’s specific needs before completing the booking through RouteStack’s hotel infrastructure.
Built by Stijn Risseeuw, an Honors Computer Science and Engineering student at TU Delft, the third place winner was the MatchRoute app, which simplifies the organization of group trips. MatchRoute combines AI, interactive maps, calendars and collaborative voting tools to help groups agree on destinations, dates and budgets before automatically generating tailored travel itineraries using live hotel, flight and car rental inventory.
The winning applications demonstrate how AI agents are now moving beyond inspiration into real-world commerce, allowing travellers to research, compare and book travel within a single conversational experience. This evolution has implications across airlines, hospitality, online travel, financial services and loyalty programmes as businesses increasingly explore how AI can create more personalised, frictionless customer journeys.
The first place winner received $3,000, a seven-night resort stay together with $1,000 in RouteStack API credits, while second place received $3,000, a seven-night resort stay and $500 in API credits, and third place received $1,000 in RouteStack API credits. Additionally, all participants received a complimentary one-year travel club membership. The winning applications and developer profiles can be viewed by clicking here.
The competition was co-sponsored by PhocusWire, a comprehensive daily news companion for the industry powered by Northstar, the leading global provider of trusted information and experiences for the audiences that drive the travel industry. The PhocusWire team and their colleagues at Phocuswright have been immersed in travel technology and the ongoing digitization of the industry for decades. PhocusWire creates original content, provides market intelligence and gives those at the heart of the industry the knowledge to make better decisions and understand what is happening around them.
Source: Custom Travel Solutions / Reality PR
