On Travelhapp.com, I share useful tips and inspiration to help solo travelers explore Colombia with joy and confidence. I’ll also let you know about interesting tours, workshops and other activities offered by carefully selected local providers. My dream is to inspire and empower more people, especially women, to discover Colombia independently, giving Bourdain’s “happy accident” a chance to happen.
I’m Nicole, the creator of the Travelhapp Colombia Travel Guide. I’m a service designer, art therapist and a seasoned solo traveler, passionate about everything around nature, art and design for social innovation.
Originally, I created Travelhapp as an interactive web app for solo travelers to connect for joint activities. This was to address two challenges I faced during my own solo travels around the planet: first, interesting tours were sometimes unavailable due to insufficient participants; and second, as a woman, I often felt a bit uneasy doing activities in nature completely alone.
Initially, I saw Colombia as a pilot country for a worldwide solo traveler platform centered around activities. However, I quickly fell in love with the country and decided to move here to be able to provide up-to-date and accurate information. There is so much worth seeing in Colombia that you could easily spend more than a year traveling – and the local people are simply amazing! (In the meantime, I got married to one of them…) Colombia once used the slogan “The only risk is wanting to stay”. Well, that became true for me.
For several reasons, last year I decided to transform the web app into a simple inspirational website and accompany it with a Facebook Group (currently focused on connecting women traveling alone).
Traveling alone offers a unique opportunity to dive into local culture, discover more about yourself, and learn through new experiences. Many people dream of solo travel but feel hesitant due to concerns about safety or the logistics of going alone. I aim to provide in-depth information and a support network so that solo travelers can fully focus on the pleasant anticipation of their trip and travel with a light heart, trusting that things will work out on the spur of the moment.
Travelhapp wants to promote responsible and sustainable travel. Traveling alone can be a life changing experience, an opportunity to grow and widen one’s horizons. However, as we explore the planet we are also jeopardizing it. As we visit lesser known destinations and talk about them, we contribute to exposing them to the risk of massive tourism. As long as we travel, we carry this responsibility and need to develop strategies on a personal and community level. I have started putting together some Responsible Travel Guidelines and would love to improve them based on your feedback and input.
One of my goals is to give visibility to small local businesses in Colombia that do a great job, especially the ones led by Colombian women. Too often local business get bypassed by big travel agencies that bring along their own tour guides and don’t really care about local impact. In Colombia tourism provides a new opportunity for a lot of people after decades of armed conflict. Small tour agencies often are run by enthusiastic people full of innovative ideas and with a great sense of social and environmental responsibility.
I would like to thank the aws (Austria Wirtschaftsservice) and the Austrian Federal Ministry of Digital and Economic Affairs for supporting the initial research and proof of concept for the original web app through the impulse XS programme.
Special thanks go to my great team, that helped me turn the original web app idea into a reality, including graphic designer Gaby Lucano, and the web developers Juan Carlos Salazar, Oscar Parra and Camilo Marin.
© 2025 Travelhapp – Colombia Travel Guide created with love by Nicole – Support my work
design by nicoleneuberger.com
