App helps travelers to connect with locals
When Toni Finnimore, 30, from a seaside city two hours south of London, came to New York City in mid-November, she wanted to hang out with locals. She had made the same trip seven years earlier and “found myself visiting every tourist attraction the city had to offer,” she said.
“The bright lights of Times Square, while dazzling, were not enough,” she continued. “I wanted to experience the real NYC.”
So she downloaded Feastly, an app that connects tourists to residents who want to host them for dinner. A few days later she was in the Upper East Side studio of two New Yorkers, Dalila Ercolani and Marco Maestoso, eating grilled skirt steak and macaroni and cheese for dinner, and laughing with three other locals and two travelers from Chicago. She ate a “divine” meal, made what she says will be long-lasting friends and secured tips for the rest of her trip. “Who needs a guidebook when you have real-life New Yorkers?” she said.
Ms. Finnimore is hardly alone in craving local experiences.
“It’s the mindset of the modern traveler,” said Rafat Ali, the chief executive and founder of Skift, a website that analyzes travel trends. “People are looking beyond manufactured experiences.”
Over the past year or so, an increasing number of tools has emerged to help them. Airbnb and Homestay may have been the first to cater to this desire, offering real homes for tourists to use, but others have quickly followed suit.
For travelers, these apps help them move beyond the sort of assistance they might get from a concierge or waiter. And because more personalized activities are often cheaper than tourist traps, they can also help on expenses. They do, though, provide a more challenging experience, making them best suited to travelers willing to take some risks.
“You have to get off the beaten path and do what the locals do,” said Marybeth Bond, the founder of the travel website the Gutsy Traveler.
And it’s not just travelers who can benefit. The apps are also “encouraging locals to act as tourists in their cities and find new things,” Mr. Ali said.
Here is a look at some of those apps.
For the Partyer
The purpose of the app Party With a Local is exactly what it sounds like: to connect users with locals for a night out, based on your location. (Think Tinder, but with a fun evening as the goal, not a date or hookup.) Users post ideas — “let’s go for a drink at this wine bar” or “come to this birthday party at this club” — and tourists can chat with them through the app and arrange to meet up. The app has 20,000 users in 160 countries (and even in Antarctica) and expects to have 16 million users within three years. (All users fill out a profile, but there is no specific system for vetting locals beyond that.)
For the Foodie
Cookening is one of a growing number of apps (Feastly, PlateCulture.com) that use home-cooked meals as a point of connection. The setup is not entirely altruistic — most of the locals hosting dinners make money by charging for the meal. (Cookening currently offers meals in New York City that cost $27-$67.) In fact, Ms. Ercolani and Mr. Maestoso, who host three to four meals a week through Feastly, are considering making it their full-time job.
For the Knowledge Seeker
Other apps are more like potential replacements for concierges. UrbanBuddy, for example, connects travelers to hand-selected locals who answer questions in real time through a live chat on their phones. “Most hotels no longer provide concierge services, and so hotel guests are forced to do their own research, which is time consuming and inefficient,” said Paul Brogna, a co-founder. Questions are answered in less than two minutes.