Welcome to Travel Massive!
Discover new ideas in travel and join our global community of innovators and thought leaders. Learn more.
+ 373 others joined this month
Comments
We just made waltru (yes, lowercase w, we're weirdly precious about it) public in both app stores, with a beta starting in Barcelona.
Here's the thing that got us started. You save up all year for a handful of free days, spend real money getting somewhere, and then somehow end up doing the same trip everyone else does. Same five photos. Same three streets. You come home having seen a city without ever quite living in it, and there was probably something worth stopping for right around the corner that you'll never know you missed.
How it works
That's the gap we've been chasing. waltru is a travel companion (for now), not a planning app. It walks with you through the city, and it talks to you first, when something around you is worth knowing, instead of waiting for you to think of the right question to ask. It also doesn't tell you and the person next to you the same story: what you get depends on who you are, the technical detail for the person who wants it, the story for the person who'd rather have that, and every so often, for anyone, a small serendipity, something you'd have walked straight past if it hadn't spoken up. It also doesn't assume the city stays the same all day: if something's changed, the weather, how crowded a place got, it lets you know and suggests three different alternatives. The decision is always yours.
We built this off a survey of 900 travelers before writing a line of code, and we've tested it enough ourselves to know the personalization works: the same street tells us something different depending on which profile we're testing. What we haven't seen yet is what happens when someone outside the team tries it, on their own trip, with nobody there to explain it.
Now live in Barcelona
So: if you're traveling to Barcelona in the next few weeks, or know someone who is, we'll give you the full trip free, in exchange for honest feedback when you're back. Good, bad, "this broke on day two," all of it.
There's also a business side to this that we think about a lot. Any travel business (a hotel, an airline, an agency, whatever) sells you something specific and then disappears for all the days you're actually out there, living the destination, which is most of the trip. If you've run into that gap from the inside, or you're just the resident travel-tech obsessive in your friend group, we'd love to hear how you see it.
Travel is where we're starting, not where we think this ends (yes, it's our Trojan horse, we'll admit it). But that's a conversation for another time.
Try it out and give us feedback
Comment here or send us a message if either of those is you.
You can find waltru at notanothertravelapp.com, or grab it on:
📲 apps.apple.com/us/app/waltru/id6772929931
📲 play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.waltru.app
Hi Lucia, congrats on the launch and I can't wait to try it out when me and @kckiwigirl visit Barcelona in October for FutureTravel Summit (and a Barcelona Travel Massive meetup - we're working on it with @benjamin-rhatigan).
What is your rollout plan for other cities / countries? And what has your initial feedback been from people who have used the app? Any early-stage insights you can share?
Hi! Thanks so much, and congrats on putting together the Barcelona meetup, would love to cross paths in October.
On cities: honestly, still Barcelona-only for now, and we're being deliberate about that rather than fast. The narration itself is AI-generated, but what a place actually has to offer, and for which kind of traveler, isn't something we leave the AI to invent. We curate that ourselves, per profile, and the AI's job is closer to putting it into words than deciding what's worth saying. That's slower to scale city by city than a fully automated approach, but it's the part of waltru we don't want to compromise on, so the rollout plan is still being shaped around that trade-off rather than around speed.
On feedback: the strongest signal so far has actually come from the business side, we're having genuinely good conversations with places that want to offer this to their own guests. On the traveler side we're earlier. We've tested the personalization enough ourselves to know it really does change what you hear at the same spot depending on your profile, but we haven't seen yet whether that holds up on someone else's real trip, that's still genuinely unfolding as more people actually use it.
Speaking of which, since you and @kckiwigirl will be here in October: it's live and public, so just grab it whenever you're around, Barcelona's the one city we cover so far. Would genuinely love to hear what you think afterward.
Was ist das waltru?
Barcelona and the Sagrada Família are also a wonderful Christian destination, just like the many Catholic and Christian sites across France.
Beyond their architectural beauty, these places offer the opportunity to create journeys with real meaning — combining faith, culture, history and spiritual discovery.
A beautiful destination for a pilgrimage or a meaningful Christian journey.