Traveling alone can be a wonderful and fulfilling experience, but in general, it’s a lot more expensive than traveling with someone else, and it can be more dangerous. But what do you do when you can’t find someone you know to travel with?
Go to the internet of course. And specifically go to the website Get A Friend For Life, or GAFFLF, to find a traveling companion.
GAFFL is designed to help people looking to travel to the same place, meet before the trip (which can happen online, or in person), and make plans together so they can split costs on things like hotel rooms or rental cars. They will also have someone to talk to during long layovers, or while exploring a new area.
It lets people travel a bit more safely, as someone going missing would be noticed quickly, and it lets people who are interested in the same travel adventures (eating, hiking, etc.) find each other, and make that the focus of their trip.
With users from 156 countries, GAFFL is starting to take off. The service works well overall; it just has some parts you should consider before you get started.
To see if GAFFL is right for you and your next trip, read on, and see the good, the bad, and how to keep yourself safe while using the site. Then, if you’re interested, go to gogaffl.com to find or create a trip, and maybe, as the name suggests, find a friend for life!
What makes GAFFL great
GAFFL works well for many reasons. First, there’s the service’s commitment to safety.
Knowing from the get-go verifying identities would be important to ensure safety of the site’s users, GAFFL has a team dedicated to verification. They go through pictures of government-issued IDs that users must provide in order to use the site. This ensures people aren’t lying about their identities, and any incidents that occur can be attributed to a particular individual, who can be brought to justice.
Furthering its safety, the site also rewards users who verify their social media accounts, emails, and phone numbers by giving them “trust points.” Trust points, which max out at 100, help other users feel safe about contacting an individual about a trip, or in letting an individual participate.
The site also has more ways to verify identities, and keep an eye on someone if anything seems fishy. With all these ways of ensuring a person is who they say they are, GAFFL is about as safe as it can be, which makes finding a travel companion a relatively safe move.
GAFFL also makes splitting costs between users easy, and part of using the site, not just a side benefit. There’s a section of the site that allows people to input bills and costs, and people can pay each other directly there, or through other means, and the person getting the money can mark things as paid.
If there are disputes about amounts, or someone is slow paying people back, GAFFL will step in and help sort things out.
The other great part about GAFFL is it offers you the chance to have a traveling companion anywhere, and virtually at any time. You could be on a longer trip, meet up with someone, and keep going. You could plan for weeks with other GAFFL users in a group chat (GAFFL automatically puts you in one once you’re part of a trip together), and then get started.
With as many destination possibilities as there are, you have a great chance of finding someone else interested, or someone perfectly qualified for your trip. If you want to road trip across the U.S., you can find someone with a license to share splitting the drive time and gas money.
If you want to go hiking where you really need a group, you can find other avid hikers. It’s all up to you, and the many other users. And when it works out, as you can see from GAFFL testimonials, it works out perfectly.
What makes GAFFL not so great
GAFFL isn’t a perfect service though, and there are some things to keep in mind before you even sign up. Namely, GAFFL isn’t free to use—you have to pay $6.99 for the first 30 days you’re on the site.
It isn’t a subscription, so that $6.99 can be a one-time purchase for one big trip you want to take. But if you want to keep using the site, you have to keep paying, or else pay $20 for 6 months of GAFFL access, or $30 for a full year.
These aren’t enormous sums of money, but if you’re already on the market to cut down on costs by finding a traveling companion, it’s not fun to have to pay money to meet them. What if you don’t like the first people you start planning with? You may run out of time before you can really get things going.
Not liking your companion is another danger of using GAFFL. The site can verify a person’s identity for you, but it can’t guarantee your compatibility as travelers. You get to speak in advance, of course, but if no one else was interested in your trip idea, or if you were desperate for the companionship to cover the cost of a rental car, you may have to settle, and that could make your trip uncomfortable.
GAFFL advertises its many success stories of strangers meeting and getting along well, which is still a possibility. But traveling with people you’ve barely met can have some potential downfalls and dangers that you may wish to consider before booking a trip. It may be better to wait for a time a good friend or partner can join you for some trips, at least.
Still, with these being the main complaints, GAFFL has more good going for it than bad. So long as you’re safe using the site, you should have a good experience. To learn how to use GAFFL safely, read on below.
What to keep in mind when using GAFFL
GAFFL itself has some safety tips for using its services.
First, only do trips with users who have verified emails and/or social accounts. These are users who would have high trust points, who GAFFL can better guarantee are the people they’re claiming to be. The more verification behind them, the more you can know about them or see them, and be sure of who you’re traveling with. That makes you safer.
The next tip from GAFFL is only make or join trips with users who have a proper profile picture. Like the identity verification tip, this one is to help you identify your traveling companion as accurately as you can.
If someone doesn’t have a picture of themselves on their profile, you can’t be sure of who you’re meeting, and you might endanger yourself. Similarly, you wouldn’t want to travel with someone who had one picture on GAFFL, and looked different in real life. Other parts of their identity could be false as well, and you could be in danger.
We would also suggest trying to video chat with your companion before you meet them to build off of this tip. It’s hard to fake video well, so you can further be sure of the other person’s appearance and identity, and show them yours.
This relates to the final tip from GAFFL, which is selecting a meet-up point with your companion that’s very public, like Times Square, or a busy coffee shop. This gives you a chance to meet your new companion in a setting where it’s easy for either of you to walk away if someone gets uncomfortable, or uncertain if you’d travel well together.
GAFFL should be used with common sense, but so long as you’re smart about who you start talking to, and you make sure you get to know your companion before you meet them, you should be fine. If you’d like to not travel alone, and find your next travel companion via GAFFL, click here, and register for the site today.
