Travel & Tourism Hackathon 2016: Building Tourism Tech in 54 Hours at AUCA
From the evening of Friday, December 2, 2016, to Sunday evening, December 4, around twenty teams worked nearly without sleep across two Bishkek venues — the American University of Central Asia by day, Ololohaus by night — to take a tourism idea from a one-slide pitch to a working prototype in 54 hours. The Travel & Tourism Hackathon was KG Labs’ first attempt to apply the rapid product-development format specifically to the question of how Kyrgyzstan presents itself online and how visitors find their way through it.
The premise of the event was a refusal of a common framing. The dominant story about Kyrgyz tourism at that point was about physical infrastructure — better roads, more five-star hotels — and the implicit assumption that everything else would follow. The hackathon proceeded from a different observation: that the country’s actual gap was digital and informational. International travelers researching Kyrgyzstan found thin, fragmented, often inaccurate online resources. The yurts, the alpine lakes, the Soviet-era observatories, the eagle hunters near Bokonbayevo, the walnut forests of Arslanbob — all of it existed, but the path from a curious search query to a confident booking did not. Closing that gap was a software problem, not a construction one.
The Lead-up: A November of Ideation Sessions
The hackathon was the visible end of a longer arc. KG Labs spent November 2016 running four open Ideation Sessions where anyone interested could come, hear from people working in tourism technology, sketch ideas with strangers, and decide whether to come back as a team for the December weekend. The sessions were designed to lower the activation cost: by the time of the hackathon, participants would already have a half-formed idea of who they wanted to work with and what they wanted to build.
Two earlier KG Labs events fed the same channel. On November 10, the TechWomen Alumni Talk brought Kyrgyz fellows of the U.S. State Department’s TechWomen program back to Bishkek to present their work. On November 17, at the GES Alumni Talk, Diana Durusbek kyzy — the project coordinator for the hackathon — used the close of the evening to publicly announce the December dates and put the call for applications into the room. Both talks helped seed the hackathon’s mailing list with people already in motion in the local tech community.
Looking back, the team’s own post-event analysis was direct about what the ideation arc did and did not deliver. Roughly ten percent of ideation-session attendees came to the hackathon itself. The sessions had been useful for the people who were already going to participate; they were less effective at converting curious onlookers. Ticket sales started later than planned, online sales were never set up, and the 1,000-som ticket price became a barrier for some students who wanted to come. The lesson — written down in the team’s own debrief, not retrofitted afterward — was that the marketing and ticketing infrastructure had to be ready months earlier than the program itself.
The 54 Hours
The hackathon followed the Garage48 format, adapted for AUCA’s classroom layout and Ololohaus’s overnight space. Friday evening opened in the AUCA Forum with registration, then moved up to CH-1 on the fourth floor for the opening ceremony — Andrew Wachtel speaking as AUCA’s president; Azamat Zhamankulov as the Tourism Department director; Zhodar Saidilkanov representing the JIA business association; and a representative from the U.S. Embassy. Aziz Soltobaev moderated and introduced the international mentors. Anyone with an idea then got 90 seconds at the microphone. By 21:00 the room had self-organized into roughly twenty teams, and five buses moved everyone to Ololohaus for the overnight working session.
Saturday and Sunday alternated between team rooms at AUCA, structured checkpoints with mentors at one-hour intervals, and three teaching blocks. Anatoliy Fedorenko ran a business-modeling training for project managers and marketers. Jaanus Sakkis, a designer from Estonia who had mentored at Garage48 events across Europe, gave the design block. Kai Isand, also from Estonia and a coordinator of Garage48 in Europe, Asia, and Africa, ran the pitching workshop. On Sunday morning, Leonid Pustov flew in from Moscow to lecture on global travel-tech projects — he had spent six years in tourism technology and had organized the TravelHub conference series and the Travel Startups community of more than 15,000 members.
The local mentor bench was the strongest part of the arrangement. Andrei Minkin and Genadiy Karev came from MadDevs — Minkin was the lead developer at Namba Taxi and a regular speaker at HighLoad++ and GDG conferences across the region. Oleg Puzanov, who co-founded the Namba family of products (Namba Taxi, Namba Food, Namba Media) and helped found MadDevs, sat with the teams on the technical side. Chyngyz Kanatbek of the Mozgami branding agency and Alexey Lysogorov, a 20-year graphic design veteran with multiple Red Jolbors awards, worked with the design and marketing tracks. Konstantin Kirsanov of Positive Systems came in from Moscow on the back-end-architecture side. Three more local designers — Nargiz Chynalieva of DILDEN and CHYNALI, plus Artur Zotov on marketing — closed out the bench.
By Sunday at 15:30 the prototypes were due. From 16:00 the teams pitched in front of a panel that mixed academia, government, and the local startup investor community: Bermet Tursunkulova; Zhumadyl Egemberdiev and Aman Tentiev (who had themselves given the Sunday-afternoon talk on Silicon Valley alongside Soltobaev); Tourism Department director Azamat Zhamankulov; AUCA president Andrew Wachtel; Zarina Chekirbaeva; Edil Ajibaev, the founder of Picvpic; Daniiar Amanaliev; and a JIA representative. Awards were announced at 18:00 and the closing ran to 19:00.
Challengers and Trelper: The Winning Team
The winning team called itself Challengers. Their product, captured on video in the archive as Trelper, was a gamified mobile concept: visitors to Kyrgyzstan would unlock culture-and-life challenges set in real locations and businesses, layering a play loop over an itinerary they were already going to follow. The judges flagged it not as the most technically ambitious pitch of the weekend but as the one that had moved furthest from the team’s first-day idea — the framing, monetization, and user journey had all visibly evolved across the three days of mentor checkpoints.
“We worked very well in the team,” said Faradj Musayev, a Challengers member, after the ceremony. “Despite the fact that we had the largest team, we all managed to find a common language and work on the project. Mentors undoubtedly helped a lot — they asked leading questions, showed us what to work on, and with their help we brought the project to the end result.” Atay Sadybakasov, who sat on the panel that evening, framed the wider weekend the same way: “All projects are quite real and necessary for Kyrgyzstan. Now tourism is moving in a different direction, and the participants picked up these trends and developed projects that will be of interest to tourists in Kyrgyzstan.”
Chyngyz Kanatbek, observing from the marketing-mentor side, made the most useful diagnostic comment of the night. The teams, he said, had a real desire to learn and were ambitious, but they had concentrated on advertising rather than marketing strategy — the mechanics of getting attention, not the structure of why someone would care. After mentor feedback, that gap had begun to close, but it was a gap worth naming explicitly: it was the same shortfall most early-stage Kyrgyz teams ran into in the years that followed, and watching it surface and partially close inside one weekend was instructive.
Prizes, and Why They Were Less Important Than the Next Week
Every member of the winning team received a branded Travel Hackathon traveler’s pillow, a Xiaomi Mi Power Bank 5000 mAh, and a Xiaomi Mi Band 1S. The objects mattered less than what came with them. Winning teams were automatically routed into the Bishkek Investment Forum 2016, held at Hotel Kamat on December 8 — four days after the hackathon closed. There the same teams pitched again in front of a different room, with up to one hundred thousand U.S. dollars of investment on the table for projects the panel thought were ready.
The structural choice — to chain a 54-hour hackathon directly into a curated investor forum the same week — was the part of the design KG Labs was most deliberate about. Hackathons left to themselves produce a wave of weekend projects that fade by the following Wednesday. By guaranteeing a real investor audience four days later, the organizers gave teams a reason to keep working through the holiday period and a concrete, named milestone to keep working toward. Whether that bridge converted into funded companies or not, the structure raised the post-event survival rate of the projects measurably above what a stand-alone hackathon would have produced.
What the Debrief Said
The team’s internal Results Analysis, written in the days after, was unsentimental. Attendance was lower than the room could hold. The four-session ideation track might have worked better as three. The promotional posters, the press release, the segmented marketing for designers vs. developers — all had moved later than the calendar required. Half the projects on the floor had been variants of mapping; future iterations would benefit from broader prompt-setting up front so the room produced a wider distribution of approaches. The grading rubric for the panel ran one to three; raising it to one to five would have given mentors more room to differentiate. None of this was hidden. The honest version of this story is that KG Labs did the work, learned a specific set of operational lessons, and wrote them down for the next time.
Event Details
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Dates | Friday December 2 — Sunday December 4, 2016 (54 hours) |
| Pre-event ideation sessions | Four sessions, November 2016 (preceded by TechWomen Alumni Talk Nov 10 and GES Alumni Talk Nov 17) |
| Venues | AUCA Forum + CH-1 (4th floor) + AUCA classrooms by day; Ololohaus overnight (Friday and Saturday). Five-bus shuttle, AUCA parking ↔ Ololohaus |
| Organizers | KG Labs Public Foundation; American University of Central Asia; Ideagrad startup incubator |
| Partners | JIA Business Association of Young Entrepreneurs; Department of Tourism, Ministry of Culture, Information and Tourism of the Kyrgyz Republic |
| Funders | U.S. Embassy in the Kyrgyz Republic Democratic Commission; USAID Business Growth Initiative (BGI) |
| Ticket price | 1,000 KGS per participant (120 ticket cap); sold at Sierra Coffee on Manas/Kievskaya, Tashrabat mall, and at the venue |
| Project coordinator | Diana Durusbek kyzy |
| International mentors | Jaanus Sakkis (design, Estonia / Garage48); Kai Isand (pitching, Estonia / Garage48); Leonid Pustov (travel tech, Moscow / TravelHub); Konstantin Kirsanov (IT architecture, Moscow / Positive Systems) |
| Local mentors | Andrei Minkin and Genadiy Karev (MadDevs / Namba Taxi); Oleg Puzanov (Namba.kg co-founder, MadDevs); Chyngyz Kanatbek (Mozgami); Alexey Lysogorov; Nargiz Chynalieva (DILDEN, CHYNALI); Artur Zotov |
| Judges | Bermet Tursunkulova; Zhumadyl Egemberdiev; Azamat Zhamankulov (Department of Tourism); Andrew Wachtel (AUCA); Aman Tentiev; Zarina Chekirbaeva; Edil Ajibaev (Picvpic); Daniiar Amanaliev; JIA representative |
| Winning team | Challengers / Trelper — gamified Kyrgyz culture and travel app |
| Prizes | Branded Travel Hackathon pillow; Xiaomi Mi Power Bank 5000 mAh; Xiaomi Mi Band 1S; automatic entry to Bishkek Investment Forum 2016 (December 8, Hotel Kamat) with up to $100,000 USD in investment available at the BIF pitching round |
| Hashtags | #Hackathonkg #techkg #KGLabs #codeyourjourney #Ideagrad |
