← All work · Community · AI · PWA · Travel
A social network for people who fly up front. Photograph the menu, AI reads it, and the app keeps working with no signal all the way across the Atlantic.
UpFront Menus is a community for first and business class flyers: a place to share what you were served, rate it, follow other explorers and build a record of your own dining passport. The hard part is that the moment people want to contribute is the one moment they have no connection. So we built it as a progressive web app with full offline access. Log the flight, photograph the menu, write the review at 38,000 feet, and it all syncs the second you land. The offline app and the online one are the same product, so nothing about the experience changes when the signal does.
Menus come in as photos. AI vision reads each one and parses it into structure: courses, dishes, the wine list, dietary information, cabin and route. Everything is tagged automatically, so the archive is searchable by airline, route, cabin and cuisine without anyone typing out a menu. Dishes and wines carry ratings, wines link to a cellar database with tasting notes and multi-currency prices, and a route quality map and side-by-side comparison let someone researching a flight see what they will actually get.
Contribution is kept moving by the social layer: XP for every upload and review, six flyer levels from First Timer to Sky Legend, collectible badges, a global leaderboard and a community hub. We built the whole application, from the offline-first PWA and sync to the AI parsing pipeline, accounts, dashboards and public browse pages, and took it to launch.
Next project