Travel Hands

Diagrammatic representation of the problem
Demo screens of the mobile app
Travel Hands in essence

Inspiration

Travelling safely, cheaply, and independently is incredibly challenging for the 285 million Visually Impaired People (VIP) across the world. Covid-19 has made it even more challenging for them to move around in the city as they might require physical assistance to navigate. There are 42,300 VIP in London and 360,000 all over the UK trying to find a solution to the problem.

VIP within our network have shared their concerns in travelling and cite that to cover 10 mins walking distance, they have to book a taxi (including waiting time, payment etc). This is expensive and is a blow to their self-confidence because of the short distance involved.

What it does

Travel Hands is a service designed to ease the outdoor commute of VIP by pairing them with sighted & verified volunteers to walk together to similar destinations ensuring a safe, convenient, and inexpensive travel experience.

With Travel Hands app, a VIP can submit a trip request that is automatically sent to a volunteer near them, alerting the volunteer to their location. The accepting volunteer will then come and pick the VIP up and walk towards the requested destination.

The VIP pay for the service and Volunteer help in a flexible way and walk more. Volunteers are vet through Enhanced DBS, and trained by us. As a thank you, they receive reward incentives based on the distance walked with VIP through affiliate corporate partners.

How we built it

I have a degenerative eye disease that introduced me to the world of blind or partially sighted people. Luckily, my eyesight has improved manyfold times but the experience has inspired me to improve the lives of VIP as we like to refer to them.

As the first step in this direction, I published a white paper in 2018 for my MA in Service Design degree from the University of the Arts London (UAL) on the topic, “How to increase employability for the VIP in the UK?”. Volunteering with the Blind Aid charity helped define the problems; thus, VIP World Services Limited was born. The VIP community shared their outdoor travelling challenges and the idea of Travel Hands was born accidentally in a social activity.

Challenges we ran into

We faced multiple challenges along the way; Lockdowns severely disrupted plans, cofounders quit, VIP did not want to go out after the pandemic. But, we have managed to navigate through each hurdle.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The service launched in May 2021 in London, in the form of a call centre, with 300+ journeys completed, 150 VIP sign-ups, and 47 active volunteers. This has helped us to gain experience and validate major assumptions. Currently, we are testing the mobile app to scale further in London and beyond.

I was awarded the Start-Up Visa (2019) by UAL and Innovator Visa (2021) by Innovate in Britain to develop my business. Despite lockdowns, we persisted in testing Travel Hands, creating a positive impact, and winning Innovate UK and Sport England grants in 2020.