Travera

A travel companion designed to help women explore unfamiliar places with greater confidence, comfort, and peace of mind.

Smartphone screens displaying a travel app called 'Travera'. The app features include finding and reviewing stays, user profile, travel schedule, and booking details, with a nature background on the launch screen.

February 2026 – May 2026

Intercurricular Group Project
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore & Politecnico di Milano · Milan, Italy

Tools used
Miro · Figma · Google Forms

A travel companion for solo female travelers

Travera is a travel companion designed to help women explore unfamiliar places with greater confidence, comfort, and peace of mind.

Overview

Research &
insights

Understanding the shared-stay experience

Through desk research, semi-structured interviews, and intercept interviews, we identified the topics and recurring situations that shaped the shared-stay experience.

We organized these findings into four key areas: communication, trust, culture, and presence. We connected the insights from these areas to the broader feeling of safety within the shared-stay experience.

An array of multicolored sticky notes on a whiteboard or wall, containing handwritten notes on communication, trust, privacy, culture, and various related topics. The notes include headers like 'Communication,' 'Trust,' 'Culture,' and 'Presence,' with subpoints and ideas written underneath.

Affinity mapping of recurring themes from our research.

Safety is not only about what happens — it is also about what we don't know.

This gap suggested that the challenge is not only about actual safety, but also about uncertainty and perceived lack of control.

For women staying in shared accommodation, not knowing what to expect from a host, the living environment, or social boundaries can create anxiety, discomfort, and pressure to people-please.

The problem

A quote from The Kelley Survey stating that 77% of international solo women travelers report feeling unsafe, but only 14% have experienced harassment, displayed on a white circle with pink quotation marks.

How might we transform fragmented news exposure into manageable, contextual experiences that encourage deeper understanding of fewer, more relevant stories?

Our goal

Scope &
constraints

The challenge

We faced the challenge of giving hosts a reason to adopt Travera alongside existing accommodation platforms, without adding more work to the hosting experience.

Our response

We reduced friction by using the AI companion to organize and communicate information for guests, minimizing host involvement while offering support that traditional accommodation platforms do not provide.

We brought together what we already knew, our assumptions, sources of inspiration, and our vision for Travera to establish a shared direction for the project.

The board helped us distinguish between what had already been validated, what we still needed to explore, what inspired the concept, and what we ultimately wanted Travera to become.

Visual
Summary
Board

A visual summary board titled 'Visual Summary Board' divided into four sections: 'You Know' with facts about guest concerns, 'You Hypothesize' with questions about assumptions and beliefs, 'It Inspires You' with brands like Booking, Dalia, Viola Walk Home, Airbnb, Expedia, Tripadvisor, and questions about solutions, and 'You Aspire To' with goals for project impact in travel safety and industry success.

Design
process

Translating the needs of solo female travelers into Travera's core feature

Screenshots of the Travera travel app on a smartphone, showing the login screen, chat interface with user Maddy, and travel accommodation options based on user exploration.

01

Personality matching

By signing in through Meta or Google, Travera uses available profile data to create the user's onboarding profile, which the AI then uses to recommend more compatible host–guest matches, reducing uncertainty around values and lifestyle differences.

Two smartphone screens displaying a travel or hotel booking app interface. The left screen shows greetings, updates, host availability, museums to visit, and restaurants to try. The right screen shows details of a current stay in Madrid, including the host's profile, stay updates, reviews, host profile, booking details, and a schedule for the day.

02

Host schedule & presence

Our research showed that guests felt more comfortable with greater control and predictability in the shared space.

In response, we designed an editable host schedule and live presence status, helping guests plan around the host's presence while preserving the host's flexibility.

Two smartphones displaying a travel app interface. The left phone shows updates, host availability, and museums to visit. The right phone displays current stay details, host profile, activities, and scheduled events for the day.

03

Social signals

Social boundaries emerged as an important part of the shared-stay experience.

This led us to create a way for guests and hosts to share optional plans and activities, making it easier to socialize when they want to, while also giving them space when they do not, without requiring an explicit invitation or rejection.

Smartphone screen displaying a chat conversation with Travera, showing an image of a wall with a stain in a kitchen.

04

Context-aware AI companion

Unfamiliar situations can create uncertainty, especially when the host is not available to help.

To reduce this uncertainty, we integrated an AI companion that provides immediate guidance based on information from the host and previous stays, helping guests understand and navigate situations in the home independently.

Making the unknown feel more manageable

Travera turned an insight about perceived safety into a design opportunity around predictability, boundaries, and control.

What started as a question of “How can we make women feel safer while traveling?” evolved into a service designed to make the unknown feel more manageable before it becomes uncomfortable.

The result

Simona Naumoska · Francesca Dalpi · Simone Rinaldo · Kemal Okudo · Reetika Patel · Veronika Koroleva

My contribution:

I contributed across primary and secondary research, opportunity identification, prototyping, and usability testing.

I also brought an inclusive design perspective, considering how Travera could become more accessible to women with different needs and abilities.

The team

Thank you for exploring my work! :)