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The apps making the world safer for solo female travellers

solo female travellers tech entrepreneurs
solo female travellers tech entrepreneurs

For her 30th birthday, Yaa Birago wanted to do something special. She settled on a trip to Europe with friends but they bowed out at the last minute. Not wanting to miss out, she decided to go on her own, travelling to Paris, Lisbon and Rome. It was in the latter that she had her very first Airbnb experience – and it wasn't a good one.

“I was sexually assaulted outside my Airbnb. When I told the host, he said it happens all the time and acted like there was nothing to be done about it,” said Birago.

When she returned from her trip and discussed the concern among friends she was disheartened – they had all experienced something similar.

A female-only Airbnb

“I knew it was time we had a community for women travellers that ensures their safety so they can travel fearlessly,” she said.

The experience was the catalyst for Femmebnb, a female version of Airbnb where both hosts and guests are female-only. The idea was threefold: to maximise women's safety, deliver a comfortable stay and build a strong community of travel enthusiasts.

Femmebnb - Femmebnb
Femmebnb - Femmebnb

Femmebnb is one of the latest to join the world of apps and websites geared towards the solo female traveller; Amica, more on that below, was also launched this year. Not to mention that travel companies catering specifically to women have grown by 230 per cent over the past six years.

This is hardly a surprise when the trend for solo female travel continues to grow, with Google Trends reporting a 70 per cent increase in the search term over the past year alone. In tandem, safety is still a huge concern for female travellers – 73 per cent cited this as a major concern in the Solo Female Travellers survey last year. The reality is that women feel much more vulnerable when alone, something highlighted by the recent media attention surrounding the cases of Sarah Everard and Sabina Nessa.

Safer mapping of cities

City breaks are one of the most popular type of holiday, with booking.com reporting that more than half of UK holidaymakers are planning a short trip away as restrictions ease – Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin being the top three.

Yet women experience cities differently from men. In Dublin, 36 per cent of women surveyed felt unsafe walking in their neighbourhood at night, compared to 13 per cent of men. In London, in the first ever ONS survey about feelings of personal safety, conducted in June this year, one in two women felt unsafe walking alone after dark on a quiet street near their home, in contrast to one in seven men. Of the survey, Nick Stripe, Head of Crime Statistics Branch, ONS, noted that while men and women both feel less safe after dark, “the extent to which women feel unsafe is significantly greater.”

Kalpana Viswanath is co-founder of safe-cities organisation Safetipin, which operates in 65 cities and 16 countries. Founded in 2013, the app maps the safety levels of different areas based on factors like lighting and public transport.

“The idea was to kind of build a tool through which women in cities around the world could put in data about how they feel in public spaces,” Ms Viswanath said.

Safetipin gives women the data they need to gauge whether certain parts of the city are safe or if they address women’s needs, like if there are public toilets for women in the area. Given that cities are largely designed for and by men – according to the World Bank, “cities work better for men than they do for women,” with women occupying only 10 per cent of senior jobs at the world’s leading architecture firms – planners need to look past a default male user in order to make streets more inclusive. Because, interestingly, Ms Viswanath found that “men felt safer on streets if there were women walking around”, a signifier that a street is likely safe.

“What I’ve realised from the data and the work over the past few years is that safety in a city is quite interchangeable with walkability so if you design a city to be walkable it is likely to be safe, and if you design it to be safe it’s likely to be walkable.

“And the problem with most of our cities is that they are not designed for the walker, they are designed for moving cars. We really focus a lot nowadays on creating walkability, improving bicycle ability, active streets, promoting good bus stops where people can sit and wait. What we’re seeing is that more women are using streets, using public space. Even though every time there is a case [of gender-based violence], there is a lot of pressure to ‘be careful’ or ‘don’t step out at night’, the responsibility to be safe gets put back on women.

“It’s not women’s responsibility to stay safe, it is the responsibility of all urban stakeholders to make sure cities are safe. So we really feel, through our data, we are trying to expand women’s access to the city and not limit it and therefore address the fear. Because fear limits the way we can move around.”

Safety in numbers

Heeral Pattni is the 24-year-old founder of Amica, a sort of travel-specific Bumble connecting women who might otherwise be afraid to take the leap to travel solo. She launched it in early 2021, a strange time one might think to launch a travel app. Indeed, she even toyed with the idea of not launching it but what she noticed over lockdown was the importance of community.

“When things started to open up again this year, people were asking when the app was going to launch, it wasn’t just from abroad, there was demand from the UK itself, for not actually travelling but just wanting to make friends,” she said.

The app Amica aims to connect solo female travellers - Amica
The app Amica aims to connect solo female travellers - Amica

Like the others, safety is a big factor among Amica’s members.

“I think Amica as a concept in itself is safety in numbers, so you can actually enjoy and experience with others and feel safer. It’s easy for it [travel] to become doom and gloom, ‘these are all the safety things you should do’, etc, and while that’s really important we want people to enjoy the experience as well as being in a new city, meeting new people,” she said.

Similar to Femmebnb, there is a vetting process for members to ensure it’s a safe space. While Amica requires a verified video of members – which will appear on the platform so other members can get a sense of who they are – Femmebnb requires registering personal information from a government-issued ID (passport or drivers’ licence), along with a verified email or social account and phone number.

Knowledge is power

The Solo Female Travellers Club, founded by Mar Pages and Meg Jerrard in 2015 and boasting over 90,000 members, set up the Solo Female Travel Safety Index, which is focused on providing first-hand reviews on safety for 210 destinations across the world. The tool works like a TripAdvisor for solo female travel safety; you log in, write a review for and rank the destinations you have visited solo based on seven variables with the objective of helping other women travelling on their own understand the kind of risks they might face to their safety.

Co-founder of the Solo Female Travellers Club, Meg Jerrard, in Turkey
Co-founder of the Solo Female Travellers Club, Meg Jerrard, in Turkey

They have also gone one step further to ensure their community’s personal safety and partnered with the new app, UrSafe.

“We tested many safety apps before selecting UrSafe because of its voice-activated SOS call function, which does not require someone who is in a stressful situation to find her phone or on having the battery-draining Bluetooth feature turned on," Ms Pages said.

It might seem that creating women-only platforms, while wonderful options, aren’t a solution to the wider problem – men sexually assaulting women. When Ms Birago conducted a survey with women about the idea of Femmebnb, some reported that they had experienced sexual harassment through using Airbnb as both hosts and guests. An investigation earlier this year by Bloomberg disclosed that the vacation rental company receives thousands of sexual assault claims yearly. Regardless of what is going on in the world, though, women will still travel. We’ll be looking out for each other.

“I want to make sure that my Airbnb experience doesn’t happen to other women,” Ms Birago said.