Ari: AI Travel Rewards App for iOS and Android

Travel rewards are genuinely confusing. Points spread across a dozen loyalty programs, flights that might be cheaper with miles or might not, hotels that may or may not be worth a transfer. Kelsey Woody, founder of Ari Rewards, wanted to fix that — not with a spreadsheet or a rewards calculator, but with a conversation.

The idea was Sunny: an AI travel assistant that answers questions the way a well-traveled, financially savvy friend would. "I want to get to Canada in the next three months on premium economy — should I use points or cash?" You ask, Sunny answers, and the booking is one tap away.

Ari is a full cross-platform app for iOS and Android, built in FlutterFlow, with a lot going on underneath.

At the center is Sunny — an OpenAI-powered assistant custom-trained on travel scenarios, loyalty program logic, and points redemption strategy. Sunny doesn't just answer; it acts. It generates itineraries, compares options, and kicks off booking flows directly from the conversation.

Around Sunny I built:

Booking modules for flights and hotels via Duffel and rides via Booking.com — real-time pricing, preference matching, and booking history

Award Wallet integration for automatic loyalty points syncing, plus manual entry for programs that don't auto-connect

Push notifications for deal alerts and booking updates

A web-based admin panel for Kelsey's team to monitor signups, booking activity, and reward balances

The whole thing was built for App Store and Google Play submission, with full source code and FlutterFlow project files transferring to Ari Rewards on completion.

Building an AI travel assistant means integrating a lot of third-party systems that don't naturally cooperate — flight search APIs, hotel inventory, loyalty account syncing, and a live AI layer sitting on top of all of it.

The harder half wasn't the plumbing, it was Sunny's answers. A response can be technically correct and still useless: "you have 47,000 Aeroplan points" is not an answer to "should I use points or cash?" I iterated on prompt engineering until the assistant gave recommendations a person could act on, and kept Kelsey in the loop throughout with real builds she could test herself rather than screenshots.

Ari shipped to the App Store and Google Play and launched to five-star reviews. Ari Rewards is now raising venture funding on the back of it.