Why location matching doesn't work for travellers

Every app that connects people runs on the same basic idea: show me who’s nearby. It works well enough when you live somewhere. You’re in the city on Monday, you’re still there on Friday, and so is everyone the app showed you.

For someone moving every few days, that idea quietly falls apart.

Nearby is a snapshot of a moving thing

When you’re travelling, “nearby” is only true for as long as you happen to be standing there. You open an app in Barcelona and see forty people. By the time anyone replies, a third of them have moved on, and you’re on a bus to Valencia.

The information wasn’t wrong. It was just out of date the moment it was collected, because nobody involved was standing still.

What you actually want to know isn’t who is here. It’s who is going to be where you’re going, when you’re going to be there.

That’s a different question, and no amount of better matching on the first one gets you an answer to the second.

Time is the missing half

Think about what you know when you plan a trip. Not just the places, but the shape of it: Lisbon for four days, then Seville, then Granada around the 20th. That’s a real, specific thing. It’s also information nobody asks you for.

So the apps work with half the picture. Location without time is a coin flip. Location with time is a plan.

Two people heading to Seville on the same Tuesday have something concrete in common. They can agree to meet before either of them arrives. There’s nothing to coordinate on the fly, no awkward “are you still around?” — the overlap was known days ago.

What this changes

Once you match on routes rather than dots on a map, a few things fall out of it naturally:

• You can plan instead of scramble. Arriving somewhere you already know one person is a completely different experience from arriving nowhere.
• The conversation has somewhere to go. “I’m in Seville Tuesday too” is a much easier opener than “hey”.
• It works best exactly when you need it most. The first day in a new city is the loneliest one. That’s the day this should already be sorted.

Where we are

We’re building this now, starting with European routes. If you’ve got a trip coming up, the waitlist is open — and the more people who join with real dates attached, the more likely it is you’ll see someone on your route the day you get in.

The plan is simple: ask you where you’re going and roughly when, then show you who else said the same thing.