Why TravelRTW
Tools that refuse to touch the ticket
TravelRTW builds tools for round-the-world and long-haul independent travel: trips measured in months, planned around a handful of bookings that cannot slip. The first tool, Availability Watch, exists because of a moment every long-haul planner knows. You build the whole route around one date - the Inca Trail, a timed entry, a refugio on the W trek - you go to book, and it is gone. The advice you find is "keep checking." So you sit refreshing a government website for days.
Availability Watch does that watching for you. You tell it the attraction and the date. It checks the official booking channel around the clock. The instant a slot opens, it sends your device a notification with a direct link, and you book it yourself, on the official site, at the official price.
Why we can never scalp you
The scalper model is to buy up scarce inventory and resell it above face value. Availability Watch is built so that model is impossible for us. We never buy a ticket. We never hold one. We never book on your behalf. We never take your payment for a ticket. We only watch a public page and point you to it. There is nothing to mark up, because we never touch the thing.
This is not a promise we could quietly drop in a future update to make more money. It is how the product is built. The moment we held inventory, we would be a different company.
What we collect: as close to nothing as we could manage
There is no account. No email required, no name, no login. Your watches are tied to a random token stored in your browser, and the notification channel is your own device's push subscription. We hold no profile of you and nothing that identifies you. If you clear your browser, the watches on that device are gone, because there was never a copy tied to a person.
The limits we build in on purpose
- No countdown timers, no "3 people watching," no invented urgency. The only real deadline belongs to the slot itself, and we report that as a plain fact.
- Cancel any watch in one tap. We never hide it.
- Watches are free during the preview. The launch policy is already written: once payments are live, a watch that never finds an open slot before your date is refunded in full. You only ever pay when we actually helped.
- If notifications were off when a slot opened, the watch page says exactly that. We never claim we alerted you when we could not.
- We watch official channels only, gently, and we drop any attraction whose own terms ask us not to.
Which places we watch, and one we set aside
The attractions we are bringing online are the ones where a sold-out date can break a whole trip: Machu Picchu, the Alhambra, the refugios on the Torres del Paine circuit. You can try the mechanic right now on our clearly-labeled demo attraction, which opens and closes on a timer so you can watch an alert fire.
We built a working watcher for the Anne Frank House too, because it sells out weeks ahead and turns away people who genuinely want to learn there. On reflection we decided not to feature a Holocaust memorial as the front door of a commercial product, so it is set aside for now rather than promoted. If we ever bring it forward, it will be with the museum's blessing and the seriousness it deserves, never as a growth tactic.
We shorten the gap between a slot opening and you seeing it. That is the whole job, and we are careful about the rest.