Q&A: Why this startup founder designed a home-share platform with women's safety in mind

There’s an inherent risk that comes with traveling to a place you’ve never been before. Anticipating the unexpected is part of the joy of travel, but for many – namely women and travelers from marginalized groups – lurking safety threats can feel more pronounced, particularly for individuals traveling solo.

For Toronto-based startup founder Yaa Priscilla Birago, a harrowing experience that occurred outside of an Airbnb in Rome brought to light the need for travel brands – and specifically, home-share companies – to take more responsibility in ensuring the safety of their guests.

In response, Birago, who has more than a decade of experience in tech, founded Femmebnb , a short-term vacation rental and social networking platform solely for women travelers and hosts.

Soft launched during the pandemic, Femmebnb is designed as a safe space for women to come together to plan and book travel, meet and share experiences.

Below, Birago, who is Femmebnb's CEO, explains how the concept came together, why there is a pressing need for the solution, the challenges faced by female founders and more. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

How did the idea for Femmebnb come about?

Femmebnb started when I traveled to Rome in 2017. I had planned to go on a birthday trip with my girlfriends to three different countries in Europe, [but ultimately ended up traveling alone]. When I got to Rome, my male Airbnb host was supposed to pick me up from the metro station, and he didn't end up coming and told me I should walk to the apartment. I got to the apartment, and I was sexually harassed outside of the apartment. It was so bad to the point where me walking back to the metro station felt like 100 years.

When I finally met up with the host, I said, “Does this happen all the time? I was sexually harassed.” And he said, “Oh yeah this happens all the time. Nothing would happen to you.”

That was the "a-ha" moment for me. He was kind enough to get me another location that was maybe a few blocks away, but it was a turning point for me because I felt so uncomfortable to even stay around where I was.

Essentially, when I came back to Toronto, I had conversations with several women, and as I continued to have conversations with so many other women, I figured that, wow, this is a situation that actually does happen a lot more than it's been talked about.

Then I came up with the idea to start Femmebnb because I figured we need to provide a solution, or at least provide a solution to try and alleviate safety issues that women face when they travel. Femmebnb is essentially a social networking platform that allows women to connect with other women while also renting spaces.

We’re using an AI component to our platform to actually allow women to explore cities while they're connecting with women while doing activities. So you're not just home sharing, you're also forced to really connect with other women when you travel to cities that you don't know. It’s been a journey, however, I'm grateful for where we are right now.

How does the platform work for both members and hosts?

Right now, when you come in as a user, you sign up with your email or Google or Facebook. We do email verification, phone number verification, as well as government ID verification. We do take it up a notch if we feel like we're not too sure about the identity and would do a video verification as a last step.

When you register and become a host, even through the process of listing your property, we will also request for you to send in utility documents as well as property documents just to verify that you do live in that property, you own that property. That’s another step of verification for us.

We also have a video personality feature already on our platform where you can record yourself for about one minute, talk about yourself, who you are, increase credibility on the platform.

Right now, because of the pandemic, it's been quite hard to get hosts on our platform. However, we have over 3,000 women from 60 different countries that have signed up so far. We just soft launched a few months ago, so we're just now trying to get more hosts to list on our platform.

What types of hosts are you trying to work with: individual home owners or property management companies?

We’re not working with property management companies right now because we still haven't figured out exactly how the verification process will work. Some of them are managing about 10 different properties, or maybe 20 different properties. We’ve trying to figure it out now. So right now, individual people that have one or two spaces we can work with, but we're still trying to figure exactly how that will work with property management.

How are hosts and members learning about Femmebnb? What have your marketing efforts been?

There hasn't been any marketing at all. It’s only been word of mouth and social media. We’ve been fortunate enough in the past week to get some press, because we actually intentionally didn't want any press around Femmebnb yet because of course our platform is new. We wanted to make sure that everything was stable, so we made that intentional decision not to get any press for a while.

Can you dig deeper into the tech powering the platform?

Right now we have the AI travel assistant, so you're able to plan your trip with our AI assistant, and you're also able to create your own travel itinerary – meaning, we either create your own travel itinerary or you allow us to spontaneously create it for you. So the AI will create a travel itinerary for you along with some recommendations for members on the platform. We also use a personality test to actually figure out exactly what kind of activities we would curate for you. So while you're doing those activities, we're also connecting you with women that have similar itineraries within that same area.

We’re working on exactly how we are going to monetize it, but for now, as you’re executing those activities that we give you or the activities that you've created, you are connecting with women along the way. There’s going to be an app where you can swipe through to see who they are … and connect to them and have a coffee.

Later on, we are also implementing a points system, so as you connect with women, you also get points and those points will go toward you're booking or donating them to charity.

Part of our platform is to really give back. We have a social aspect where we give a portion of every transaction to girls in Africa in need of menstrual products. We’re still iterating as we go, but this is something that we are we're working on.

As a founder, what have been some of the biggest challenges you've faced?

I think so far, the biggest challenge has been, number one, funding, and number two, the naysayers. There's a bigger platform already out there, which is Airbnb and Vrbo, and we're coming in with this niche.

Trying to convince people why this platform is needed has been a bit tougher. However, as women share their stories with us - when we're meeting with anybody, we do share some of these stories with them, be like, “Hey, I'm not the only one that went through this. There's several women that have gone through it.”

That has been the challenge, really trying to allow people to understand the need for the platform and of course funding to really help us scale.

For investors, it can sometimes be hard for them to believe in a solution they don't see any personal benefit from.

Exactly. Because we are facing those challenges with men being the majority of investors, we’re really focusing on collecting women’s stories. Just this week I had over 20 women email me and send me messages on Instagram telling me, “Thank you for the service and sharing your stories.”

We’re gathering all of them together to show, look, it does exist. Just because you did not go through it doesn't mean someone else did not go through it, and not everybody's actually going to come out there to share what they've gone through because of stigma. It is needed. It is something that women do need. Of course we cannot guarantee safety but we will maximize it any way possible in any way that we can.

Do you think the larger travel platforms are doing enough regarding safety, and where is there room for improvement?

I don't think they're doing enough. I know Airbnb had said before the pandemic that they're going to do something around verifications, every single person that's on the platform. I don't know if it was actually completed. There are so many fake listings, houses that are not even safe or houses that do not exist. There's not enough processing in terms of really verifying that some of these listings are actually legit or actually credible. I think that there needs to be more ways that they verify users on your platform. It's easy to come on the platform, easy to list. There has to be a way for you to verify these hosts, to make making sure that there's more credibility and trust and really ensuring safety for women.

For us, we're taking that into account. We are verifying everyone on the platform, we are verifying properties. And as I say, we cannot guarantee it, but we are putting in these steps to be able to at least maximize or reduce it as much as possible.

For bigger platforms like Airbnb, some of these processes should have been set from the beginning. I think was not done. Now it's getting really difficult for them to actually resolve some of these issues or find solutions for them.

For us. We are starting with these operations, we're starting with these processes and we're starting with these verifications. It kind of gives us a leverage to really make sure that we’re creating an inclusive culture, creating a safe space, because that has been our intention from the beginning.

Where do you hope Femmebnb is one year from now?

A year from now, we want to be able to welcome more women in our community. We want to be able to connect more women using our technology. We also want to know that we're making a difference in the lives of women, in terms of really empowering them economically, and also empowering them to really travel fearlessly without having to think your safety's at risk. A year from now, we want to definitely have a bigger community than what we currently have right now.

Have you explored partnerships with other travel brands?

We are exploring some partnerships with travel brands. We actually just went into a partnership with one, we are about to announce it. We're also in talks with other travel brands. One would help us give more information to guests in terms of safety information in certain areas. That’s a partnership we’re looking forward to actually having.