Girls Love Travel previously went down this route before shuttering that effort. Meanwhile, Merritt and The Travel Squad are considering launching an app as the company is in the midst of a seed funding round. Girls Love Travel and Solo Female Travelers use booking platforms WeTravel and YouLi, respectively, to sell their group getaways. But they are hard at work engaging booking platforms to power their trips. “We connect them up with likeminded people prior to going traveling, solving that problem.”Īlthough their communities are growing, those companies still have a long way to go in terms of raising funds and generating revenue. “People in our community are worried they won’t meet anyone out there if they just go alone and understand they’ll have a better time doing things with a bunch of friends,” said Alex Merritt, the creator of The Travel Squad, which launched during the pandemic and now has roughly 69,000 members on Facebook. These communities attract like-minded individuals, especially those who don’t have anyone in their daily lives or regular social circles with the desire to travel like they do. “When you are female and alone, the risks are different to other travelers,” Pages said. Solo Female Travelers also runs a survey about the safety of destinations purely from the solo female traveler perspective and publishes an index now referenced by the U.S. It’s all the hotel owners, drivers, even right down to the porters on Mt. Pages works hard to ensure her company’s tours are as close to 100 percent female-run as possible. Three of them are exclusively female while the demographics of the Travel Squad also skew heavily female. In addition, the communities I discovered appeal largely to women. Meanwhile, Haley Woods, the founder of Girls LOVE Travel, said her group started running trips because that’s what her community wanted. “We have travel products as a means to support the community, not the other way around,” said Mar Pages, the brain behind Solo Female Travelers, which has more than 188,000 members on Facebook. All of them started out as a safe place to meet online, chat about travel and obtain information about destinations. One of the things I noticed was how important that community was to each group’s leader, something that sets them apart from traditional tour operators.
Travel communities that formed in social media platforms like Facebook, Tik Tok and Instagram saw membership grow substantially during the pandemic, even when travel wasn’t possible.īut are these real travel businesses taking market share from the status quo operators or are they growing the market by filling a void? I set out to meet some of the people behind these groups to find out more. Covid obviously was a disaster for tour operators but not all of them suffered equally.