Beth Santos, founder of Chicago-based women-focused travel startup Wanderful, loves to use Airbnb for the authentic travel experience and connection to locals. But she hesitates to use the service when she's traveling alone.
And she found that many who use Wanderful's platform (which connects female travel enthusiasts and bloggers through meetups, conferences and online communities) feel the same way: In an internal survey of 150 of their members Wanderful found 54 percent of their members stay in hotels when they travel alone, and 48 percent of those cite safety as a reason.
"As we've noticed when you travel with your family or friends or your partner you travel one way, but when you travel by yourself a lot changes," she said. "You definitely become more attuned to your own personal safety."
When you travel by yourself a lot changes
To address this gap, Santos just launched the first homeshare network specifically for women. The network, which will be hosted on Wanderful, is a combination of Airbnb and Couchsurfing (a website where people can request to crash on someone's couch for the evening) in that women can either request to meet up with a local host for a drink, coffee or a tour around town, or request to stay overnight with a host. Hosts can choose to offer their couch or extra bedroom for free, or for a fee.
Currently the service is only open to Wanderful members (membership is $15 per month or $119 per year), a group that Santos found was enthusiastic about the idea: 74 percent said they'd be more likely to stay with an all-female homeshare network when traveling solo. Within a week of Santos launching the homeshare network, a sixth of paying Wanderful members had signed up to be hosts, Santos said. And while safety may be a concern for some, particularly those who are staying in a new city overnight, hosts also act as a guaranteed friendly face in an unfamiliar destination.
"[We] make it so that wherever you are in the world, whatever airport you land in, there's someone in the Wanderful community who can help you out, who can be a friend, who can meet up with you for a cup of coffee, who can refer you to a doctor, or who can host you in her home," said Santos.
This homesharing network could also appeal to the growing number of female travelers, many who are striking out on their own: 72 percent of American women said they are interested in solo travel, according to a Booking.com survey. And women-focused startups have popped up in other sharing economy industries, including ridehailing (Safr) and coworking (The Wing, Hera Hub).
Santos has spent the last decade cultivating a global group of of like-minded women travelers, first through her own travel blog "Go Girl," and then through Wanderful, a global network of women travelers that she grew while an MBA student and Zell Fellow at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.
Wanderful offers meet ups in over 25 cities worldwide, connection to like-minded travelers through online forums and Facebook groups, a blog with travel tips, guided trips, an annual Women in Travel summit for influential travel bloggers and a new series of retreats for community members called Wanderfest (the next one will be held in October in the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania). The startup has 15,000 online visitors and over 300 paying members.
In addition to the homeshare network, on March 8 (coinciding with International Women's Day) Santos is launching a partnership with nonprofit Womentum, a platform that crowdfunds loans to women entrepreneurs in developing economies and encourages these women to pay-it-forward through donating to another female entrepreneur in their community. Each Wanderful will work with Womentum to select an entrepreneur on the platform, and they'll donate $10 from every new membership to support her venture.
"We thought that was such a fantastic, tangible interpretation of what we're trying to create with our network of women helping women around the world," said Santos.
