Key issues

Safety is a global, social, emotional, personal, contextual problem; a constant concern for some, not all. Women often feel unsafe while travelling, and feeling safe is harder in a foreign space. For women, safety is a daily and inescapable reality. The world is not always a safe place for women, and being a woman can be enough to be at risk almost everywhere. This can lead to women feeling the need for 'constant vigilance' while traveling due to the risks posed by both unfamiliar environments and broader societal factors.

• Gender Inequality (in Travel):
  Heightened safety concerns for women: There is a significant difference in how men and women experience travel, with women often facing more safety concerns. Women represent almost half of the global population, yet travel experiences were predominantly designed without considering their unique safety concerns. Women traveling alone or with other female friends face additional risks, from harassment to violence, which often leads to restricted freedom and less adventurous travel plans.

• Information Gap in Travel Safety:
  Difficulty in assessing safety in unfamiliar environments: Feeling safe is harder when in a foreign space. Travel safety information is often reactive, focusing on violence, harassment, and abuse. However, there was a lack of holistic, preventive information about what makes a place feel safe, whether it's cultural considerations, infrastructure, or personal experiences. Existing platforms did not effectively address or curate this safety data.

• Underrepresentation in Travel Services:
  Balancing safety with the desire for unique travel experiences: Despite women being key decision-makers in the global travel market, there is a significant gap in women-first experiences, services and resources that prioritize safety and well-being in travel. Women often have had to compromise and stay in their comfort zone rather than veer off the beaten path to explore freely.

Opportunity

The subjectivity of safety, what feels safe where, varies greatly. As more women step into their freedom and power, more women confront overcoming fear while travelling solo. With a lack of precedent addressing comprehensive travel safety solutions, the challenge was to create a solution that redefined how safety and empowerment were integrated into the travel experience for women. There is a clear shift in need for personalized, verified, informed options to journey with confidence.

Safety is broad and subjective:
Initially aiming for a universal safety index, we quickly realized that safety was highly contextual. Depending on age, health, education, exposure, cultural background and a wide range of various other factors, safety was considered very differently. Research showed increasingly more women were interested in travel so we pivoted to focus on safety in travel experiences.

• Provide Verified, Safe Travel Options:
  Curate and offer travel experiences that were not only reliable but also verified safe for women, considering personal, emotional, and societal safety needs. The solution had to lean into being transparent about what factors made it safe.

• Empower Women:
  Empower women to confidently travel, offering them choices, information, and reassurance that could minimize fears and give them more autonomy. Traveling solo requires a balance between thinking smart and staying safe without succumbing to fear. The platform reinforced an empowerment narrative for women to take up space wherever they are.

• Leverage Community-Driven Insights:
  By tapping into the wisdom of other women who had been through similar experiences, the platform intervened in the decision-making process with real data, first-hand reviews and safety ratings that truly represented the unique concerns and needs of female travellers.

Key features

The almost-ideal solution is a systemic intervention to incorporate safety standards in travel environments, shifting the onus of being safe away solely from the individual woman to it being spread across evenly throughout the ecosystem. The IKA Travel marketplace offers curated travel experiences that are verified safe and can be easily booked on the go, with a suite of unique features to address the identified gaps: A verified-safe, travel experiences marketplace

Women-First Safety Index:
Taking the guesswork out of being safe: A key feature of the IKA Travel platform is the women-first safety index, where each listed destination/experience is assessed based on real-world data from women who had visited. Data sourced from UGC like reviews, community insights, and validated through on-ground local partnerships, that offers a customized safety score tailored to the traveler’s preferences and personal comfort levels.

• Verified Travel Experiences Marketplace:
  Contextually verified: IKA Travel curates lived real experiences by women focusing on accommodations, tours, and activities that were not only exciting but also safe for solo female travellers or women traveling in groups. Curated by IKA, each listing is handpicked for exploration, is vetted and has detailed insights, including safety tips, local cultural considerations, and tips for women.

• Seamless Booking and Access:
  A mobile-first experience designed for the modern traveler, the IKA platform enables users to seamlessly browse and book their experiences on the go, ensuring ease of access, speedy bookings and confirmations in destination, requiring no pre-planning seeking quick solutions.

• Community-Driven Data:
  The platform enables a community for women to share their personal experiences and provide real-time updates, helps create a dynamic and ever-evolving map of safe places to visit. utilizes crowdsourced data to update the real-time safety index. This also fostered a community of like-minded travelers, enabling discussions and advice sharing.

Methodology

Starting with user research, customer journey mapping, and iterative prototyping, we grounded our process in real user insights, adapting through continuous feedback and engagement from our core community of sponsor users and women travelers.

User Research & Market Validation:
We conducted deep-dive qualitative and quantitative research into the safety concerns and travel behaviors of women. Interviews, surveys, and secondary research helped define the scope of safety as a personal, social, and cultural issue. This phase surfaced distinct regional and contextual patterns, allowing us to identify high-friction moments in the travel journey and distill core pain points. These insights informed the key services and features IKA Travel needed to prioritize.

Customer Journey Mapping:
We developed detailed customer journey maps to visualize how women navigate travel—from inspiration and planning to booking, in-destination experiences, and post-trip reflection. This revealed emotional highs and lows, trust gaps, and critical moments where safety concerns most impact decision-making. Mapping these journeys clarified the need for features like pre-verified experiences, transparent safety indicators, peer validation, and real-time community feedback. These journey insights became a foundational blueprint, aligning product design and feature development with the real-world needs of women travelers at every touchpoint.

User-Centered Design:
Drawing from journey maps and research findings, we designed around women’s lived experiences, specifically focusing on moments of vulnerability and empowerment. Direct engagement with travelers helped us shape intuitive user flows and design features such as the women-first safety index and verification layers. We ensured that the platform’s design not only reduced friction but also reinforced a sense of agency and assurance throughout the user journey.

Prototype Testing:
We translated journey insights into wireframes and prototypes, building MVPs that we tested with our community. These feedback loops were crucial for validating assumptions, refining features, and adjusting for nuanced safety expectations. Prototypes were stress-tested through scenarios derived from customer journeys to ensure relevance and usability in real-world contexts.

Community Engagement & Feedback:
To support continuous iteration, we created feedback channels through which travelers could share experiences and suggestions. Exploring engagement tools like gamification and reward-based reviewing, we encouraged users to contribute to the collective safety knowledge base. Community testimonials also served as a key trust-building mechanism, ensuring that IKA Travel remained grounded in the evolving needs of its users.

Outcome

The intended outcome of IKA Travel is to enable women to feel safe in their own choice of living spaces and to create travel search experiences that make the world safer. The underlying principle is that the answer to travel safety concerns is not solely more laws or safety devices, but a more integrated and community-driven approach.

• Empowering Women to Travel Freely:
  IKA Travel is more than just a platform; it is a movement that enables and encourages women to reclaim their freedom to travel without fear. By offering insights into what makes a destination truly safe, IKA provided the reassurance women needed to take up space and explore the world with confidence.

• Market Opportunity and Growth:
  The travel market was undeniably skewed in favour of women in 2018, with nearly two-thirds of global travellers being women. IKA’s offering tapped into a large market opportunity, proving that women’s safety and empowerment in travel was a viable and valuable niche.

• Validated Concept for Future Growth:
  While the startup didn’t go beyond the pitch stage, the business model, women-first approach, and the product’s focus on holistic safety resonated wholly and showcased the potential for growth and further development in creating an inclusive, empowering travel space.

Outcome

1. Holistic Safety Index: A women-first safety index takes into account the diverse nature of safety concern, leading to the creation of a multi-dimensional safety index that assessed destinations not only by crime rates but by infrastructure, cultural considerations, access to resources, population density, emotional safety and numerous other user-identified factors.

2. Community-Driven Insights: A community-driven approach to safety assessment builds trust, provides real and relevant insights and validates in real time. Recognizing that women trust other women, seek peer reviews and validation, the IKA platform incorporates real-time reviews and recommendations from other women, creating a community-based safety network.

3. Product-Market Fit: Combining curated experiences with a robust safety index and convenient booking addresses key pain points for travellers seeking safe adventures. By providing women with the tools to make informed decisions, IKA Travel aims to simplify the process of finding safe and secure travel experiences, reducing fear and increasing exploration.