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 (Figure 1.0).
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 relied on users planning trips in the app and then returning afterward to log the places they’d visited.
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
Optimizing the entry point
With the addition of Quick Log, it became important to surface multiple high-priority actions immediately upon opening the app. To accommodate this, I redesigned the entry point as a radial menu that provides quick access to key actions from a single tap.
Compared to a traditional list, the radial layout improves glanceability and spacial recognition by assigning each action a distinct position, making them faster and easier to locate (Figure 3.0). Interaction effort is further reduced by thumb-friendly positioning, while subtle animations and haptic feedback reinforce a fast, lightweight interaction.
Designs
Effortless logging
The key challenge was to remove as many barriers as possible to finding and logging a place. The resulting experience automatically surfaces places nearby and auto-focuses the search bar, so users can quickly search for a destination or select from nearby results, then mark it as “been" or “want to go” with a tap.
Get Place from Photo
The “Get Place from Photo” feature leverages users’ natural tendency to remember places they’ve been by revisiting their photos. Originally introduced within Lists, it extracts place information from photo metadata and was the most frequently used method for adding places to past Lists. Bringing it into the Quick Log experience was a natural fit.
Minimizing Perceived Depth
Transition into the feature was designed to be fluid and fast. 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.
Designs
Rewarding repeat engagement
To encourage continued engagement, I connected Quick Log to an existing feature called the Tracker, a map that visualizes where users have been (Figure 3.3). As users mark more places as “been” within a country or state, that region becomes a deeper shade of green.
When a newly logged place advances a user’s Tracker level, the app celebrates their achievement with a notification and small burst of confetti (Figure 3.2). This ties logging behavior to visible progress and moments of recognition that feel meaningful without interrupting their experience.
I also surfaced the total number of places a user has marked as “been” on their profile as a vanity metric to further reinforce their sense of accomplishment (Figure 3.4).
More screens from the app
