Apps Aim to Assist Gay Travelers

Inspired by the advent of the sharing economy and the LGBT community's embrace of web-based dating sites, developers of two new cellphone apps aim to assist gay travelers in connecting with local hosts and residents in cities around the world.

San Francisco resident Christof Wittig created Vespa as a way for people to find recommendations about gay bars and gay-friendly accommodations from residents of the cities they are visiting. Since launching earlier this year, the app now covers 270 cities in more than 70 countries, from Israel and Laos to Myanmar and Russia.

"It is a gay Yelp or gay Tripadvisor," explained Wittig, 46, who co-founded the LGBT social networking app Hornet in 2011, which now has 6.5 million users worldwide.

Because the word vespa is Italian for wasp, Wittig is not running afoul of copyright issues with the Italian scooter brand of the same name sold by Piaggio and Company. He chose it partly because hornet in Portuguese is vespao.

"I like insects, you can see," said Wittig, who grew up in Munich, Germany and moved to the U.S. 12 years ago to attend Stanford's business school. In the fall of 2013 he married Juan Vargas , his partner of nearly 19 years.

Vespa now has more than 5,000 LGBT-friendly locations listed on the app, from gay bars and cafes to saunas and beaches. Wittig sees it as filling a need for those gay men interested in an online platform to meet people where the focus is not sex-based.

"I started Vespa so that gay life, entertainment, enjoyment goes beyond just hooking up," said Wittig.

In July the gay-owned firm Sonders and Beach in Milan, Italy released the app WIMBIFY - which stands for "Welcome to my back yard" - as a gay-focused version of home-sharing sites like the San Francisco-based Airbnb. But the app serves to connect gay travelers with gay homeowners willing to host them for free in their home.

It is also meant as a way for people traveling alone to find other single tourists looking to share lodging and other costs, such as rides to and from airports.

"The concept behind the application is based in the increasingly popular philosophy of the sharing economy," explained co-founder Andrea Cosimi in a news release about the new app.

Fellow co-founder Alessio Virgili , 30, explained in a phone interview with the Bay Area Reporter that the idea for WIMBIFY came from single gay people on their Quiiky-branded tours of Italian cities, such as their "Vatican in a Gay Light" tour of the Vatican Museum.

"More of our clients ask if we have some travel companions available for travel with them. Many of our clients travel alone," said Virgili. "We have crazy idea to give to LGBT community marketplace where they can meet someone new, a travel companion, or share their accommodations for free. Or find an LGBT travel guide that shows them their place in a gay-friendly light."

As an example of how WIMBIFY works, Virgili said the company had teamed with a group on an Atlantis gay cruise docking in Rome to help those passengers looking for rooms to stay in the city as well as cabin mates.

"This is a need that the community has. We are helping other people to share a cabin," he said. "I think we can satisfy these needs."

While Vespa connects users in need of a room to hotel booking sites like Expedia and hotels.com and is adding a link to Airbnb, its main focus is to curate a list of gay-friendly destinations in each city that are rated by users of the app. Its tagline is "Discover gay places worldwide." Users of the app can post reviews about places and add their favorite hangouts.

"They are all man-curated not machine-curated," noted Wittig.

Another feature allows users to bring up the address of the bar or nightclub they wish to visit in the language of the country they are in and show it to a cabdriver. It also maps out the location.

"I was in Moscow the other day at Mono, a bar that courts a gay crowd after 10 p.m. The scene there is not very open, so you need to know how to get there," said Wittig, a frequent traveler who has visited 60 countries.

The Vespa app also allows users to connect to one another directly through either their Hornet profile or Facebook account. It is geared toward fostering social connections between gay people the world over, explained Wittig, so travelers can connect directly to ask for advice about places to visit in a person's hometown or meet up to grab a drink.

"You can see a list of people who have reviewed a place and contact them via Facebook or their Hornet profile," said Wittig. "It is fully optional but very popular; you would be surprised. Sixty percent of users are currently connected to Facebook or Hornet."

Both of the apps are free to download. WIMBIFY, which has a San Francisco office focused on marketing and commercial concerns, is already available for both Android and Apple iPhones, while Vespa is currently in the Apple store and plans to soon have an Android version to download.

Since launching in April, Vespa has more than 10,000 users, and Wittig is aiming to quickly hit the 100,000 mark. The app does receive a referral fee when users book a hotel through it and is looking at charging businesses to be listed on it, but for now Wittig said his main goal is to grow the user base.

"I am not right out to make money from day zero. It is about building the community," said Wittig, who has invested his own money into creating Vespa.

He is also looking to create an incentive program to induce users to review places listed on the app. When users do so, they build up points and move higher up the app's leaderboard, shown as a crown icon on the tool bar at the bottom of the screen.

Each city also competes to be listed on the main page of the app, with the more reviews and users from that city moving it higher up the list.

"This is all in the making. We are still testing," said Wittig. "I am very happy with it already."

As for WIMBIFY, it charges users a fee of no more than $10 per night when they arrange accommodations through the app. The app requires users to provide it with a valid ID, such as their passport, in order to book rooms.

"This is for the connection and the safe guarantee we give to the user," said Virgili.

Users earn credits that can be applied to their next trip to save on room costs, he added. They hope to have 15,000 people using the app by the end of 2015.

"WIMBIFY is a way for people to share unique travel experiences and destinations," explained Virgili. "It allows people to host others for free by using the WIMBIFY app. This isn't about renting rooms or paying to use someone's flat. It's about meeting people for friendship and sharing resources. It's about connection and safety. What better way for a member of the LGBT community to feel safe and secure in a foreign country than with a local member of that LGBT community as their guide."