Checkout - The Travel & Hospitality Hackathon

About the challenge

Come build the future of travel and hospitality in a single day. Checkout is NYC's first travel-themed hackathon — a one-day, in-person sprint where founders, engineers, and designers team up in the morning, build all afternoon, and demo real products to founder-judges by evening.

Checkout is about shipping something real, not slideware. Travel and hospitality is one of the biggest industries in the world and one of the most underbuilt in software — from clunky booking flows to hotels running on decades-old systems. We're looking for working products that make travel or hospitality genuinely better. We're not looking for polished pitch decks with nothing behind them, or projects you built last month and dusted off for today.

Get started

Your challenge: ship something real that makes travel or hospitality better — in one day. Pick one of four tracks and go.

• AI trip planning — agents and copilots for booking, itineraries, and personalized travel
• Hotel & hospitality ops — front desk, guest experience, revenue management, back-of-house
• Local & experiences — discovery, tours, restaurants, events, the on-the-ground trip
• Sustainability & the future of travel — green travel, accessibility, how people move and stay