Virginia Tech Students Code the Future of Travel  

Reimagine the future of travel. Then, create it.   

This was the challenge posed to 154 Virginia Tech students at CodeFest, an event sponsored by the Pamplin College of Business and hosted by Marriott International, on October 18-23.   

Pamplin Dean, Saonee Sarker Ph.D., kicked off the event with Naveen Manga, chief technology officer of Marriott International. Manga shared a vision of building the best end-to-end travel experience, with technology at the core. He ended with a “call to adventure” to the assembled teams: “Dream so big that it scares you. Then, dream bigger.”  

This began a whirlwind 48 hours for teams to ideate their solution, develop a working prototype, and prepare their presentation. The teams delivered their results in 8-minute pitches, presented to Marriott judges from multiple departments including Software Engineering, Infrastructure Delivery, Cyber Security and Enterprise Products.  

The event, which was open to coders and non-coders alike, was held in Virginia Tech’s state-of-the-art Data and Decision Sciences building, the first building in the Global Business and Analytics Complex. Opened in 2023, as part of the Tech Talent Investment Program, the building functions as a transdisciplinary collaboration space, hosting multiple functions under one roof.   

The opportunity to approach holistically a real-world business problem encouraged participants with both technical and non-technical backgrounds to join.  “It’s essential that we have cross-functional teams with different perspectives.” said Lakshmikant Tripuraneni, Vice President, IT Application Development at Marriott International. “The best products come out of cross-functional thinking.”  

Pualena Heather, who is studying economics and joined team Peregrine at the event, said that typically, her experience with teams consisted of accountants or people looking to get into investment banking.  “So, I haven’t had the opportunity to really dabble too much into the technology development side,” she said. “This has been an awesome opportunity to work through bottom-to-top what that process looks like.”   

The five-member Peregrine team said they spent much of their allotted time planning and researching, to help them understand the pain-points and opportunities in the hospitality industry. This approach ultimately helped them bring home first place.   

“What they [the students] are experiencing is very similar to what we’re going through in our project planning,” said Oliver Alvarez, Marriott’s vice president of security architecture & engineering who also participated as a judge.  “We’re always presenting new ideas or things that we need to do at Marriott, so it’s similar to the formats we’re seeing here at Virginia Tech. You have eight minutes to make your presentation. If you have a demo, what is it? What is the impact?”    

Embracing Marriott’s approach to bringing value to guests and the company won Team Peregrine’s project, “Chariot” the top prize.  “If all of our eyes were closed, that could have been a product planning meeting in Bethesda, on any random day of the week, thinking about what's next on our roadmap,” said Clay Hall, Marriott’s Sr. VP for Enterprise Products and CodeFest judge.