Startup Spotlight – WoWanders: An intelligent travel diary

Taru Aalto, one of the founders of WoWanders talks to us about how they have created the world’s smartest travel diary.

Taru Aalto & Maija Kaukonen are members of the Travel Massive Helsinki chapter. While Taru has enjoyed beaches & hiking in 60+ countries, Maija likes to explore the routes less traveled, such as North Korea and Iran. They are engineers by education and have long experience from international business.

How did you get into the travel industry?

Our startup is our first step into the travel industry. Before starting WoWanders earlier we had both worked in telecommunications, technology, strategy and fashion industries. We chose to start building our company as we saw sharing in travel wasn’t working optimally, and because of the frustration people have with travel planning.
We just finished our pilot and plan to launch in select countries during the European summer.

Can you explain WoWanders in 50 words? Go!

We have created the world’s smartest travel diary app with which anyone can automatically build a diary of their trip including info on hotels, restaurants, and sights that they visit. The app is also a platform for easy friend2friend sharing of tips: no more spending hours and hours planning your trip and being overwhelmed with options but rather getting recommendations from those who you know and trust.

What is unique about your product?

Three aspects make our product unique:

1) Creating a travel diary is almost fully automated

2) While your diary is private you can easily share selected parts as practical recommendations with friends, and

3) It offers people relevant and filtered recommendations instead of an overwhelming amount of choice.

How is WoWanders changing the future of travel?

We are changing two things:
1) We make sure everyone can have their travel memories automatically recorded, and even more importantly

2) We enable easy recommendations between friends for hotels, restaurants, and sights, and thus make travel planning a much more social and joyful process.

Tells us about another travel company you admire and why?

I’m not sure I would call it a company but more a community: Girls Love Travel. It’s an amazing community for women to share travel experiences and has grown exponentially. I also admire Hopper because it shows how with a simple idea you can add a lot of value to people. I also admire Airbnb and especially its founders for the determination they had to change where people stay when traveling.

We have just finished our pilot and plan to launch in select countries during the 2018 European summer. In the beginning, we will focus our marketing efforts to Northern Europe but we welcome all Travel Massive members to test the app and give us their feedback. If you would like access to WoWanders you can download the app from GooglePlay for Android users and for Apple users on iTunes.

Photo credit to the wonderful Veera Bianca.

 Follow Taru Aalto and WoWanders on Travel Massive to connect with them and learn more about WoWanders.