Citing reasons like independence and wanting to challenge themselves, more women are opting for solo travel than ever before.
In a survey on Booking.com, it was reported that 65 percent of their female users were traveling alone. According to Google Trends, web searches for “solo female travel” have been steadily rising in the past five years.
Wanderful, a Boston-based lifestyle company, aims to create a community for solo women travelers. The startup began as a travel blog in 2009, and has since expanded to include a home-sharing platform, local chapters, and conferences.
Wanderful’s home-sharing platform is similar to Airbnb and other hosting platforms but prides itself on being a specifically “woman-to-woman” platform. To create a profile, the company requires users to identify as a woman, though the platform does account for gender diversity and acknowledges that the definition of woman may vary per person. The platform is aimed toward solo travelers, but can also be used if users are traveling with a significant other or friends. Hosts also don’t have to live alone but must specify the number of people in their home to their guests.
“Whether in online spaces or in-person spaces, we help women who at some point have felt vulnerable in their travels have a safe space to be able to connect with each other to share their stories, to bask in this deep love of travel that they have,” said Beth Santos, CEO and founder of Wanderful.
One feature of the platform that differs from platforms like Airbnb is that Wanderful doesn’t accept instant bookings. Instead, Wanderful conducts in-person interviews with both hosts and travelers. For hosts, this is so the company can verify that their home is the same one they advertised on the platform. For travelers, it’s more of a talk about what they want out of the platform, and a verification that they do identify as a woman.
“We all come from different backgrounds and different experiences and wouldn’t it be amazing to be able to show up in any city around the world and instantly have someone be there who can give you advice, who can meet you for a cup of coffee, who can host you in her home?” said Santos. “That’s the whole purpose of what we're doing here from our chapter to our home-sharing network.
Beth Santos was recently featured as one of BostInno’s 50 on Fire finalists. She was inspired to found Wanderful by her own travels. When Santos was a year out of college, she moved to São Tomé and Príncipe, a small Portuguese-speaking country on the west coast of Africa, and began teaching there. While there, she began to realize that there were a lot of things she wanted to know as a woman, but that she couldn’t find on the Internet.
“Questions about birth control access, questions about access to a doctor, maternity abroad, cultural norms, street harassment: All of these things were things that were very regular parts of my day and yet you couldn’t Google anything,” said Santos.
She began to blog about her experiences, and since then, Wanderful has expanded into a lifestyle company. In addition to the Wanderful’s blog and home-sharing platform, the startup has launched a number of local chapters in more than 46 cities around the world. These chapters hold a number of events throughout the year and are a place for local or traveling women to meet and share their passion for traveling.
In 2014, the company also launched the Women in Travel Summit, a B2B conference for travel creators to meet and talk about the future of the industry. The conference now has around 400 attendees each year, and in November, Wanderful will be launching its first Women in Travel summit in Europe.
The company is mainly bootstrapped but had a small pre-seed funding round at the beginning of this year. In May 2020, Wanderful is launching the Bessie Awards, an award’s show to honor women of impact in the travel space. Santos is also going to hit the road with the Travel & Adventure Show in 2020, and will speak about travel in six cities, Boston included. Going forward, Santos also plans to create new Wanderful chapters across the globe.
“Our vision is to create a space where you show up in any airport around the world and you immediately have access to somebody who can help you,” Santos said.
Beth Santos is one of BostInno’s 50 on Fire 2019. Meet Santos and the rest of the Winners November 7 at our Annual 50 on Fire event at Artist for Humanity. Grab your tickets here.
