The Valencian Flor Soler traveled to Australia a few years ago, where she spent time studying and working. It was a solo trip, but after a few days he began to need social contact, conversation with others, he was looking for like-minded people… That “you want to do things with more people and you don’t know where they are or how to connect with them, so I thought I’d create this app.” This is how Bunji was born, a mobile application that allows users to match through AI with that travel companion with whom you would share, a priori, a thousand and one adventures.
He launched the app in 2019, but the pandemic arrived. Everything stopped. In 2021, the desire to make up for lost time organically boosted the app and Soler, a biologist by training, saw her users create trips again and invite dozens of people to connect with them. “The main value is connection. The core of our business is that people travel alone, but there is a point in the journey where you always want to connect with someone – to share expenses, to go on adventures – and we help you do it.”
“There are more and more people who travel alone and there are many more facilities for solo travel, it is a business segment that has a brutal growth of 20% per year,” says the 32-year-old businesswoman from Gandía. The users of her app are young like her, between 25 and 35 years old, but she also finds a growing group of people between 45 and 55 years of age.
“It is a niche to be exploited, we have realized that the part of the experiences in a trip is key so that no one stops living the world for being afraid of traveling alone”, explains the entrepreneur. And it is that Bunji started without charging for its use, but its rapid growth has encouraged the firm to include a section of destination experiences that users can book and for which they charge a commission.
Finding fun plans for travelers wherever they are is also the goal of Your Friends are Boring, another Valencian startup also incubated at Lanzadera, Juan Roig’s accelerator at Marina de Empresas. Of course, they offer their trips to residents of only four cities: London, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco.
The proposal was launched by two entrepreneurs, Clara Haba from Valencia and Amaury from France, during a study stay in the United States. She had previously founded an online travel agency that was forced to close due to the pandemic, so with that ‘backpack’ she ventured into this new project.
“It sounds simple, but we sat together in a cafeteria and I was telling him what I was doing before Covid. We decided to try doing the same in the United States, so we proposed a trip to Nicaragua in a Facebook group for surfers In three days, 200 people wrote to us,” recalls Clara.
With three bikinis in her suitcase and a lot of enthusiasm, she says that she traveled to the Nicaraguan country where she was the first destination for this fledgling business. “And once there, what we call the ‘camp effect’ happened, which is what marks all trips a bit: we connected a lot, we made a great group, it was incredible.”
They are looking for those 10 people who enroll in the trip -which has an average price of 1,500 euros of which the company keeps a margin of 25%- to return excited and to keep in touch in WhatsApp groups that they review with curiosity, because ” If a few months later it is not still active, the trip has been a failure”.
Now that they are based in Valencia, they are looking for leaders among influencers in their disciplines to help carry the journey forward, such as Caitlyn Lubas, a traveler who has been to more than 70 countries and has written a book called You Are Where You Go about your travel experiences.
Both proposals are based on the idea that making new friends can be difficult and the need, demonstrated during the pandemic, for contact with our peers. “If what you like is diving, then dive, you don’t have to wait for your friends or family to accompany you on a trip for that,” defends Clara Haba. Another way of doing tourism and enjoying leisure in the 21st century.
