Travel Hands charity relieves the needs of people with visual impairments by facilitating safe, convenient, and inexpensive outdoor travel so they can attend formal appointments, recreational activities and community events.

Travel Hands App is designed to ease the outdoor commute of VIP (Visually Impaired People) 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 pick up the VIP and walk towards the requested destination.

The VIP pay for the service and Volunteer help in a flexible way and walk more. Volunteers are vetted 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.

Travel Hands started in May 2021 in London as a call centre, with 450+ journeys completed, 170 VIP sign-ups, and 78 active volunteers. This has helped us to gain experience and validate major assumptions. The algorithm of the mobile app is created from learnings and feedback from these journeys. The web-based application and mobile app have been designed following the WCAG 2.1 accessibility guidelines and following user research and testing with our VIP community.