Solo travellers — backpackers, gap-year students, business travellers, people doing the bit of the world they always meant to. Vygard Solo Travel sits on your phone with the local embassy number pre-loaded, hostel check-in monitoring, and a taxi-share that auto-ends so your parent doesn't have to keep texting you.
Tap your country on landing. We pre-load the local emergency number (it's not always 999), the British / your country's embassy address + phone, and language helpers for hospital + police.
Check into your hostel (tag the location). If you don't check out within 24h of your expected leave, your home contact gets a quiet ping. Same for taxi rides — share the route, auto-end on arrival.
If you press SOS, your home contact gets: live location, hostel address, country embassy contact, and a 'who to call' guide for your country's emergency services. They can act from home.
No clever onboarding to dig through, no settings menu to find. Open the app, see one big button. Tap it. Get on with the leg of the trip. The whole UI is built around “your hands are on the task, not the phone”.
195 countries. Embassy address, after-hours emergency phone, local police + ambulance + hospital. Updated quarterly from FCDO data.
Tag the hostel on arrival. No check-out within 24h of your expected leave date = quiet ping to home. Sleeping in is fine; disappearing for 3 days isn't.
Live pin during taxi rides, auto-ends 10 minutes past expected ETA. Useful in countries where taxi apps aren't reliable.
One-tap action loads embassy address + appointment booking + replacement passport application + 'how to get home without a passport' guide for your country.
If you've paired with a buddy who's at the same hostel, you both get a pin if either presses SOS. Mutual aid for backpacker groups.
Pre-arrival briefing: parts of town avoided after dark, scam patterns, weather. Sourced from FCDO + crowd-reports from previous Vygard travellers.
Solo travel comes down to one device — the phone in your daypack. We design around that. eSIM unlocks the data plan in 70+ countries without buying a local SIM. Optional satellite via Garmin inReach for genuine off-grid stretches.
App stays free even when you swap SIMs / eSIMs / WiFi. Embassy + country data updated quarterly from FCDO + State Department sources. We never share your itinerary with anyone outside your chosen contact.
For an extra few pounds a month, Vygard's AI virtual watcher takes over the quiet 24/7 monitoring job that your trusted contact can't reasonably do. Howie sits in between your check-ins and your home contact, flagging anomalies before either of you have any reason to worry.
Vygard Solo Travel
Embassy contacts, hostel check-in monitoring, taxi-share with auto-end. Your home contact gets the alerts. You manage the rest.
Vygard Solo Travel + 24/7 AI watcher
Vygard's AI virtual watcher monitors your check-ins 24/7 across timezones. Flags travel anomalies before your home contact has any reason to worry — particularly useful for the long stretches in countries with patchy cell coverage or unfamiliar emergency systems.
36 hours of no movement at your hostel in Ulaanbaatar — Howie pings you with a quiet 'still OK?' check before the 24h hostel-checkout window expires, while you're probably just hungover.
FCDO advisory level changes mid-trip for the country you're in — Howie surfaces it inside the app and to your home contact with the specific area + travel advice.
You stop posting your usual taxi-share pin for 4 days during what should be city travel — Howie spots the pattern break and prompts you to confirm everything's fine.
Embassy contact attempts that fail (out-of-hours, language barrier) — Howie tries alternative numbers (consulate, FCDO emergency line, your country's nearest consular agent) and surfaces them in priority order.
Howie is a Large Language Model running on your activity + check-in data. It can't replace human judgement and isn't a substitute for situational awareness, proper kit or telling someone where you're going. It's the layer that catches quiet anomalies before they become emergencies — and quietly does nothing the majority of the time, which is the whole point.
Every Vygard Personal app is designed so the vast majority of alerts cost us nothing to send. SMS and WhatsApp — which we'd otherwise burn at 3-5p per message — kick in only as an emergency fallback. That's why the apps stay at £4.99/mo.
If your contact has any Vygard app installed, they get a push notification with the alert + a tap-to-call button. Instant, no SMS cost.
If they don't have a Vygard app, your phone's own Messages app opens with a pre-filled SOS text + a one-tap install link. iMessage and RCS deliver it for free.
If your contact can't be reached any other way — or it's a genuine unconscious SOS where you can't tap — Vygard sends an SMS via Twilio. Counted against your monthly allowance.
Parallel path to SMS for contacts who use WhatsApp as their primary messenger. Same counting, same allowance pot.
Sized for ~5 SOS events per month at 4 messages each. Most users never get close to the cap. If your allowance runs out mid-month, the app falls back to opening your phone's Messages composer instead of blocking the alert — your safety is never gated on a billing limit.
Top-ups are monthly add-ons in your account settings — cancel anytime, no contract.
Per-user SMS cost is the biggest variable expense in any consumer safety app. If we shipped "unlimited SMS" on a £4.99 sub, we'd have to choose between losing money on heavy users or making the cap dishonest. By being explicit upfront — push-first, native handoff, then metered SMS — we keep the sub price low for everyone, and the people who do need more (frequent travellers, large family groups) pay a fair top-up.
Full breakdown in the FAQBackpacker safety apps fall into two camps: panic buttons (bUSafe) that nobody uses because they're embarrassing, or 'tell everyone where you are all the time' apps (Life360) that lose battery and trust. Vygard Solo Travel is the middle path — you tell ONE person, they see what they need to see, and 99% of the time it just sits there providing peace of mind to your parents.
Vygard Solo Travel cannot replace travel insurance, your country's embassy support, or local emergency services. It's the layer that gets you to those resources faster — embassy contact, emergency numbers, hostel check-in monitoring. The app does not work where there's no cellular coverage; for remote / off-grid travel (deep jungle, polar, deep desert) you need satellite emergency communication (Garmin inReach, Iridium SOS).
We'll email when Vygard Solo Travel ships (Available now). No spam, one email, you're first in line.