waltru just went live in Barcelona — it speaks up while you're walking a city, before you'd think to ask.

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