We got our civil partnership in East Ham. Not Soho. Not Brighton. East Ham, the registry office on Barking Road, ten minutes from our flat in Canning Town.
People expect a different origin story. They hear "queer couple building a queer travel app" and picture two people in a Notting Hill mews house or a Hampstead terrace, all linen curtains, design books, and tasteful little Pride objects. We live in Newham. The nearest easy drink is more likely a chain pub under strip lights than a members' bar with a velvet rope. Even by car, the nearest queer bar is a proper drive away.
This matters because queer life, for most queer people, happens in ordinary parts of the city too. The neighbourhoods where you're the only visibly queer couple on the street. The places where belonging isn't handed to you by a rainbow flag in a window. You build it yourself, person by person, over time.
That's what we're trying to put in an app.
The Gap
Open the App Store. Search "LGBTQ+." Count how many of the results are dating apps.
Now search "solo travel." Count how many of those results include queer safety, identity context, or even one screen that acknowledges your existence.
The first search gives you dozens of apps that want to help you find a date. The second gives you apps that assume you're straight, or at best don't care either way. The app that says "you're queer, you're traveling alone, let's help you find your people" does not exist.
We know because we looked. For years.
How We Got Here
We did not get here because we are two glossy full-time travelers with matching passport stamps. Tai has the bigger map, stretching from Japan and Italy to Croatia, France, Thailand, and plenty of places in between, the kind of trips where you learn a city through train stations, hotel lobbies, side streets, and the one good dinner you manage to find before bed.
My travel history is smaller: Seychelles, Kenya, Zambia, and the UK. Not a huge list, but not a soft one either. Kenya and Zambia still criminalize same-sex sexual activity. Seychelles decriminalized it in 2016, but legal does not automatically mean visible, easy, or safe in the way queer travelers actually mean safe. Generic travel advice misses those differences.
When we're together in a place, those calculations are easier. You have someone beside you. You can read a room together. If the vibe is wrong, you leave. If it's right, you stay. Backup changes everything.
When one of us is away from familiar people, it gets more complicated. You can search Reddit. You can open an app that was built for dating and try to bend it into friendship. You can set a profile to "looking for friends" and hope everyone understands that you mean it. But the mechanics are still built for flirting: swipe, match, message, decode the tone, wonder what the other person thinks this is.
That pattern kept showing up. Dating apps can tell you who is nearby, but not whether the bar is actually safe for you tonight. Google can tell you a venue exists, but not whether you should say wife at the table, whether holding hands outside is normal, or whether the person messaging you wants a friend, a date, or something you did not ask for. The information exists in fragments, the people exist in fragments, and the tools that connect them are usually built either for dating or for straight travelers. Nobody had built the thing we kept wishing existed.
The Problem Isn't Loneliness. It's the Missing Plan.
Queer people are good at finding each other. We've been doing it for centuries, in coded language, in specific bars, in glances across rooms.
What we don't have is a simple way to do it while traveling.
When you land in a new city as a queer solo traveler, your options look like this:
Dating apps. You open Grindr or HER or Hinge and toggle "looking for friends." Nobody takes the toggle seriously. The conversation mechanics are built around attraction, swipe, match, message. Even if you genuinely want friendship, the app nudges you toward something else. You end up closing it feeling worse than when you opened it.
Google. You search "gay bars in [city]" and get a list of venues that may or may not still exist, reviewed by people who may or may not share your definition of "welcoming." You find a Reddit thread from 2019 that recommends a neighbourhood. You find a travel blog that calls the whole country "gay-friendly" without specifying what that means for a trans woman versus a cis gay man versus a non-binary person.
Instagram. You search the city's geotag and the Pride hashtag and find beautiful content from people you have no way of contacting, in a place you haven't arrived at yet, doing things you'd love to do if you knew anyone to do them with.
Nothing. You go to the hotel bar. You walk around. You hope something happens. Sometimes it does. Usually it doesn't. You spend the trip oscillating between freedom and loneliness and you come home and tell people it was amazing because the alternative, admitting you spent four evenings alone in a city full of people, feels like failure.
We've both done all four. The fourth one is the worst.
Why Not Just Add a Feature?
The obvious question: why not just add a "travel mode" to Grindr? A "friend finder" to HER? A "queer filter" to Couchsurfing?
Because bolting a feature onto the wrong foundation doesn't work. And the foundation matters more than the feature.
Dating apps are built around attraction. The profile photo, the swipe, the match, and the notification all point at one question: do you want to see this person again in a romantic or sexual context? When you try to use that same setup for friendship, something feels off.
General travel apps have a different problem. They are built for everyone, so they miss the queer-specific questions. Is this neighbourhood safe after dark? Will this host actually be welcoming? Does "LGBTQ+-friendly" mean I can hold my partner's hand, or just that nobody will say anything? Those questions are not part of the product.
We know this because we've used all of them. We've tried to make dating apps do friendship. We've tried to make travel apps do queerness. We've tried to make Google Maps do safety. None of it works because those tools are solving a different problem.
What you need is a product built around queer travel, trust, and friendship from the start.
What We Actually Built
Wanderkin does one thing: it connects LGBTQ+ solo travelers with verified queer travelers and locals wherever they're headed.
Here's what that means in practice.
You add a trip. Destination, dates. Ten seconds. The app shows you other verified queer travelers who'll be in the same city at the same time, and locals who live there and are open to meeting up.
You see real people. Not profiles optimised for attraction, profiles built around travel. Where they've been. Where they're going. What they're into. Their identity, on their own terms, disclosed as much or as little as they choose.
You connect. A direct message. A group chat for everyone in the same city that week. A meetup someone's organised, dinner, a walking tour, drinks, a museum visit. You RSVP, you show up, you meet people.
You're safe. Every user is selfie-verified. Every profile is real. Community guidelines are enforced, this is not a dating platform, and behaviour that turns it into one gets you removed. Safety tags on places and neighbourhoods are crowd-sourced by the community, so the information is specific, current, and written by people who share your concerns.
That's it. No swiping. No matching. No algorithmic mystery about why you're seeing who you're seeing. You're going to Berlin next week, here are the queer travelers and locals who'll be there, say hello.
The Distinction That Matters
"Not a dating app" isn't a slogan. It's a design constraint that shapes every decision.
Profiles lead with travel plans, not photos. Because the first question isn't "are you attractive?", it's "are you going where I'm going?"
There's no swiping. Because swiping is a judgment mechanism, and judgment is the opposite of what you need when you're looking for a dinner companion in a city where you don't know anyone.
Group chats exist alongside direct messages. Because friendship often happens in groups, three people at a table, four strangers who end up spending the week together, and the app should reflect that instead of forcing every connection through a one-to-one funnel.
The community guidelines explicitly prohibit romantic or sexual solicitation. Not because romance is bad, we're literally married to each other, we're not against romance, but because the moment the first unsolicited "you're hot" message lands, the trust collapses. Every queer person has been in a space that was supposed to be safe and felt it turn into something else. We'd rather be strict and keep the space than be permissive and lose it.
If a friendship becomes something more, that's your life. Take it to a personal channel. The platform stays what it is: a place to find people to travel with.
Who It's For
Wanderkin is for the person staring at a Pride event page thinking "I want to go but I don't have anyone to go with."
It's for the person who went to Lisbon alone and got lucky and met three strangers at a restaurant, and for the person who went to Lisbon alone and didn't get lucky and ate dinner by themselves for five nights.
It's for the person who opens a dating app in a new city and thinks "I don't want any of this, I just want a friend for the afternoon."
It's for the person who's never traveled solo because the idea of being queer and alone in an unfamiliar place feels like too much, and for the person who travels solo all the time and is tired of improvising.
It's for the queer couple in Canning Town whose nearest queer bar is a drive away, just as much as it's for the person living above a drag bar in Soho. Wanderkin is built for the parts of queer life that happen between venues, plans, train stops, and the long way home.
Why Now
Two things are true at the same time.
The first: queer travel is growing. The LGBTQ+ tourism market is worth over $330 billion. Solo travel is the fastest-growing segment of the industry. Those two curves cross on a gap nobody's filling.
The second: the world is getting harder. Anti-trans legislation is accelerating across the US. LGBTQ+ rights are being rolled back in parts of Europe and Africa. The number of countries where being queer is criminalised hasn't meaningfully decreased in a decade.
When the world gets harder, community gets more important. Not community in the abstract, community in the specific. A person in the same city, the same week, who shares your experience. A local who knows which neighbourhood is safe and which isn't. A group chat where someone's already figured out the metro and the good restaurants and the Pride parade route.
This matters. When you're queer and traveling alone, it can change the whole trip.
We're building that practical layer from a flat in Canning Town, with a civil partnership certificate from East Ham, because queer travelers need more than inspiration. They need people, context, and a way to make plans.
What's Next
Wanderkin's launch network now covers 50 cities across Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Australia. The city guides connect practical safety, neighbourhood context, seasonal planning, and real community instead of reducing a destination to a list of gay bars.
If you've read this far, you're the person we built this for. Come find your people.
