Flaire
Acquired by Pangea in April 2026. Flaire is a social travel app serving 45K+ Gen Z and Millennial travelers.
Context
Gen Z’s social hub for travel
Flaire combines the trust of social proof with the convenience of AI, helping users discover recommendations from like-minded travelers, plan future trips, and capture and share their travel experiences—all in one place.
At launch, Flaire’s main feature was Lists—collections of places used to create itineraries, guides, bucket lists, and more.
My role: I was Flaire’s founding (and only!) designer, taking the app from inception to acquisition. The app launched in April 2025 and was acquired by Pangea in April 2026.
The Challenge
How might we help Gen Z travelers continuously capture their travel experiences between major trips, so that contributing recommendations feels like an ongoing habit rather than an activity tied only to a few annual vacations?
To build out its library of trusted recommendations, Flaire primarily relied on users planning trips in the app and then returning afterward to log the places they’d visited by marking them as “been” and rating them, as well as adding photos and notes.
However, most Gen Z travelers take only a few major trips each year, inherently limiting opportunities to contribute new recommendations and slowing the growth of Flaire’s recommendation dataset. It also meant that many users interacted with the app sporadically, making it difficult to establish lasting engagement habits.
Goals
- Increase platform stickiness while continuously growing the recommendation dataset that powers personalized travel discovery
- Better serve travelers who regularly explore locally
Key metrics
- WAU/MAU
- # places logged (marked as “been”)
Solution
A new main feature solely dedicated to logging individual places outside the ecosystem of Lists.
Overview
New feature:
Quick Log
Designed to be the “Shazam for places,” Quick Log enables users to instantly find and log places they’ve visited directly from the home screen. As a new core experience, Quick Log expands Flaire’s value beyond trip planning, giving users a reason to engage with the app even if they never create a single List.
2 weeks development
Designs
Designs
Animated radial menu
The + button in the bottom navigation was originally dedicated to creating a new List. Because the Quick Log experience needed to be easily accessible as soon as a user opens the app, I designed a radial menu that allows the + button to be utilized for multiple key features.
The radial design keeps all the features within thumb reach, while the animation and haptic feedback make the interaction feel lightweight and responsive.
Get place from photo
This feature, which already existed within Lists, extracts place information from a photo’s metadata, leveraging users’ natural tendency to remember places they’ve been by revisiting their photos. It’s the most frequently used method for adding places to past Lists, so bringing it into this experience was only natural.
Places near you
The feature automatically surfaces places nearby using the user’s location, making it convenient to log a place on-the-go.
Sheet animation
Transition into the feature was designed to feel fluid and lightweight. Opening as a sheet that quickly expands to full screen, users never feel like they've ventured deep into a separate part of the app.
Rewards
Another Flaire feature, the Tracker, is a map that provides a visual representation of where the user has been. The more places a user has been within a country or state, the deeper the shade of green. To celebrate when a user reaches a new level, I designed an achievement notification with confetti.
The total number of places a user has marked as “been” was also added to the profile as a vanity metric alongside their Tracker.
More screens from the app
