Travel IQ: An AI-Powered Smart Travel Recommendation and Budget Planning System

Planning a trip usually means hopping between search engines, booking sites, notes and spreadsheets, and on a group trip the money is often sorted out by hand at the end. This paper presents TravelIQ, a web application that keeps trip planning, a conversational travel assistant and shared-expense tracking in one place. A traveller fills in a single form and receives a day-wise itinerary, can put follow-up questions to the assistant, and can then divide a budget across spending categories, record expenses, split them among companions and compare planned and actual spending on a dashboard. The system is built in layers: a React and Vite frontend, a Python FastAPI backend that exposes REST endpoints, a MongoDB database and an external AI service that is reached only through the backend. The implementation was checked with twelve functional test cases, of which ten passed and two exposed known limitations (weather forecast availability and incomplete form input), and the arithmetic of the budget and settlement screens was verified on a six-person demonstration trip. The evaluation is functional only. Recommendation accuracy, itinerary feasibility, response time and user-study results are not reported, and the paper closes with its limitations and the evaluations that should follow.