About

Over the past few years I've been moving through Southeast Asia and took a trip to some countries in Europe. In these travels, I've been talking to people who travel differently from how the industry imagines they do: women travelling alone, people of Muslim faith, queer travellers, older travellers, travellers with disabilities, people whose passports are read with suspicion at the wrong borders. This is what I've found.

The major online travel agencies, Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb, were not built to handle any of them. They were built for a default user. The traveller who is not asked questions at borders. Not charged extra for arriving alone. Not designing the trip around safety. The default is rarely a description of who a company intends to exclude. It is the path of least resistance for the company building. The cost of falling outside the default is paid in real money, real time, and real worry, by real people.

Here is part of the map.

None of these is a niche. Each is a real group of real people whose specific needs the dominant products mostly do not account for. Travel is one of the largest industries on earth. Most of its products are built for a narrow slice of who actually travels.

I'm building products in travel for the people travel hasn't been built for. Sola is the first.