Hidden Gems World Travel Guide (RAG)

A Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) chatbot that answers questions about hidden travel gems using locally generated markdown guides.

Setup

1. Generate the Travel Guides

Before running the app, you need to generate the travel guide markdown files:

python hidden_gem_finder.py

This will:

• Create the hidden_gems_output/ directory
• Generate 5 continent guide files (africa_guide.md, asia_guide.md, europe_guide.md, americas_guide.md, oceania_guide.md)
• Each guide contains 3 countries with 10 sites per country (15 countries total)
• Uses OpenAI gpt-5-nano to generate the content

Note: This requires an OpenAI API key in your .env file and will make API calls to generate the guides.

2. Run the RAG App

python app.py

The app will:

• Load and index the markdown guides from hidden_gems_output/
• Start a Gradio chat interface
• Use OpenAI gpt-5-nano for retrieval and answering
• Use Anthropic claude-sonnet-4-5 for evaluation and auto-retry

Environment Variables

Required:

• OPENAI_API_KEY - For chat and embeddings
• ANTHROPIC_API_KEY - For evaluator (optional, but recommended)

Features

• RAG over travel guide markdown files
• Automatic country detection and validation
• Auto-retry with evaluator feedback
• Clean UI with information about available countries and fields