5 tech-enabled ways to improve your travel experience

This summer had me traveling for 3 months for various reasons, but I still had to keep up with work and other aspects of regular life, such as health and fitness. Throughout my travels I discovered some wonderful and now essential businesses and apps that made the whole experience much more manageable. Below are 5 businesses that can support your travel — and my honest take on them.

1. Office space on demand — Deskimo

As I was moving around for 3 months, I did not have a fixed office space. At times, finding a productive place to work caused a bit of anxiety. Enter Deskimo (YC S21). Through Deskimo I can rent coworking space by the hour anywhere in town. It’s really handy — since I don’t have a fixed place of work I can just pull up the app wherever I am after a meeting, before a workout, etc. and find the nearest office space. It’s quieter and cheaper than a cafe (coworking spaces usually come with tea and coffee), there’s no shortage of plugs, and the wifi is a lot stronger and more stable. And at least in Hong Kong, with the ongoing pandemic-related restrictions, I pretty much had the place to myself each time.

Checking in and out, payment, etc. is done through the app. When you check in you even get notified of the wifi password. It’s a very good product, and a very good service. For now they are only available in Singapore, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Bali… Can’t wait for them to expand to other markets.

2. Store your luggage anywhere — Bounce

Another problem I often have when I travel is luggage storage. Although I regularly travel light (this time being a glaring and painful exception), I still find myself dragging a duffel or a large backpack up and down the city I am visiting. In most cities post 9–11 it’s hard to find luggage storage or lockers in convenient places these days

This summer I discovered Bounce, which connects people who want to drop off their luggage (people like me) with shops and commercial spaces that have a little extra space and want to earn a little extra money.

My use case: The other day I wanted to have lunch with my friends before catching my train at Liverpool St, so I dropped off my stuff in what was essentially a random shop, paid $5 through the app, and picked them up a few hours later before my train.

I liked how easy it was to use, the convenience was second to none, and I highly recommend it…. if they are in the city you are interested in. While they have a lot of options in London and Paris, in Asia there aren’t many yet.

I also wonder about liability. If the police had raided the place near Liverpool Street and found an illegal item/substance in my bag — who’s liable? I could always claim it wasn’t mine — it must have been the person in the store who put it there while I was gone. I’m sure there’s an answer for this, but I can definitely see some bad people misusing this kind of service.

3. No more SIM cards — Holafly

I have a very affordable service provider back home, but their roaming charges are prohibitive: It’s something like $20 per gigabyte. I usually opt to buy a local SIM card, but this strategy doesn’t work so well when a) you land at your destination outside of regular business hours and the relevant shop at the airport is closed, and b) you travel to countries with strict regulation surrounding phone numbers (like France, Spain) where such temporary SIM cards are not really an option.

This summer I relied a lot on Holafly, which is an eSIM provider. For the other fellow dinosaurs out there, eSIMs are exactly what the word might suggest — electronic SIM cards that can be installed and used on your phone without a physical SIM card. With Holafly, you select the region you will be in and the duration you want it for, check out, and immediately you receive straight forward and foolproof instructions on how to install it. You can tell they have really thought about user experience and worked hard to make sure everyone walks away with a positive experience.

All the packages come with unlimited data, which is useful for me since I consume a lot on the daily, but technically after 2gb on any given day they degrade the connection significantly. I believe they piggy back off large carriers, so coverage was never a problem. They also block tethering, and this was actually quite painful since I occasionally need to connect my laptop to the internet to refresh email, etc. I think the 2gb cap already covers any potential abuse of the system, so I would love to see tethering made available.

Pricewise, Holafly was fair, but certainly not the most competitive — the local option, if you can find it, will probably have better deals. The other thing I didn’t love was the rigidity of the packages — at the time of writing they cover 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 60, and 90 days. It looks like a large offering, but I don’t see why I couldn’t get customized pricing. I was in Europe for around 45 days and I didn’t like the idea of having to pay for 60. I’d love to see an additional feature where you put the number of days you’ll be traveling there and you get the price. I think this can be a small hit on their margins that is offset by the benefits of a better customer experience.

Still, I liked Holafly. I have already used it twice this summer (in Europe and the US) and I can definitely see myself using it again… if the local option is not available.

4. Fitness #1 — Cycle anywhere with Spinlister

I am an avid triathlete, and I like to keep up with training while on the road. Running and swimming can be solved pretty easily (although knowing where to go can be a challenge — more on that below), but cycling is tough. Unless you are willing to bring your bike with you all the time, there aren’t many easy ways to keep up with your riding.

I discovered https://www.spinlister.com/ a few years ago. It’s an “AirBnB but for bikes” kind of company: people put up their bikes on the platform and riders can book them and communicate directly with the bike owner. I’ve used it a couple of times throughout the years, most recently this summer over a weekend in Helsinki.

I love the idea behind it — it allows me to travel with the bare minimum (I bring my own helmet, pedals, cycling shoes, and a toolkit), and still get a “proper” riding experience at a fraction of the price and anxiety that schlepping my own ride would cost.

I find the problem to be one of supply: there aren’t really many bikes in the places I am searching. In Hong Kong there was only one person with a road bike; in London the pickings were slim, and in Helsinki I managed to book the bike but again the owner was the only one there and he was not too close to the city center. Maybe the value proposition for the bike owners is not honed enough, or people are not used to seeing their bikes as an asset they can get additional income from.

Spinlister actually shut down a few years back, and reopened only recently. I guess the founder decided to keep going. I hope they will continue to grow, at least so I can continue my cycling :)

5. Knowing where to exercise — Garmin and Road Warrior Project

Still, once you have your bike, or you’ve got your running shoes on, and you’re in a town you are not familiar with: where should you go?

I have a Garmin watch and their app has a cool feature that creates a route for me based on a) how far I want to go (distance) and b) in which general direction I want to go (north, south, east, west, random). It will then generate a route for me using its data based on popular segments from its users. I’ve used it a few times for running and cycling and it’s been great for the feeling of “here’s one more thing I don’t need to think about anymore.”

That feature works well in a pinch, such as when I needed to find a cycling route that took me from Helsinki to nearby Porvoo. It was a pretty route, but I got the sense that if I had been more familiar with some of the backroads I could have seen some really beautiful sights.

This is where an element of curation comes in, and this reminds me of a project that Aisling Grogan and I worked on during our time at INSEAD. The Road Warrior Project is a curated database of the world’s best places for running, cycling, and swimming, so you can keep up with your training during your travels, and explore the best parts of your destination in an entirely new way. So if you find yourself in Paris, for example, you can pick from a small selection of curated routes so that you can get your workout in while enjoying the city. Try it out!

Bonus: the conscientious shower by HYDRAO

Now that we are finally taking the conversation surrounding climate change a bit more seriously, let me share a cool thing I discovered during my travels.

The shower at our hotel in Dinan (France) was equipped with a shower head from HYDRAO , which lights up when you turn it on, and will change the color of the light based on your water consumption. So if you use more than 10L it will change from green to blue, and then to purple, and then finally red.

The nudge value is huge — it was very effective in pushing me towards taking shorter showers. It’s also very educational. I didn’t realize just how quickly those first ten liters would get used up!

I’m not sure how “legit” it is, but if it works as advertised, besides the societal gains from more conscious water consumption, the cost reduction for the hotels must be tremendous.