Travel Companion Exchange

» see travelcompanionexchange.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Jens Jurgen spent twenty-one years solving a problem the internet would later claim as its own, and he did it with envelopes. Travel Companion Exchange opened on Long Island in 1982 and matched people who wanted to travel but not alone. You filled in a questionnaire about the habits that actually matter at close quarters over two weeks: smoking, money, how early you get up, whether you plan or wander.

Members received a monthly mailing containing the profiles of everyone who currently had travel plans or wanted to make some. Within the first year there were 2,500 active members across 48 states, plus Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Japan. By 1997 the service had been through more than 70,000 people. Newsday rated the newsletter one of the three best general travel newsletters in the country, and write-ups in the Los Angeles Times and Prevention produced floods of mail.

It had been running for sixteen years before I owned a modem. Jurgen closed it in 2003 for personal reasons. Nobody bought it and nothing took its place in-house.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the man who would not go online ~

The part worth recording is that Travel Companion Exchange could have become a website and declined to. Jurgen would not move it to the web, and his stated reason was the privacy and safety of his members: a home address and a set of personal habits, sitting in a database anyone could query. He did put up home pages, but they existed in order to give you a mailing address and a phone number.

Every service that did the thing he refused to do proved him at least partly right. Travel-partner matching on the open web turned into exactly the problem he had named, and the companies that built it spent the following two decades adding verification and background checks to get back to roughly where a mailed newsletter had started.

~ how the matching worked ~

The questionnaire is the whole invention. Jurgen had worked out that compatibility for a shared trip is not about shared interests at all, it is about tolerances: budget, pace, noise, how much silence a person needs at breakfast. He built an instrument to capture that and then did the matching by hand, from paper, for two decades, in a category that would later spend venture money on recommendation engines to approximate the same thing.

~ what came after ~

TCE was first, and most of what the category has produced since is the same questionnaire with the stamps removed. The travel-companion sites of the 2000s and the find-a-roommate-for-this-trip features bolted onto booking platforms all collect what Jurgen collected, faster and with less reading.

The domain is still registered. travelcompanionexchange.com answers 200 with an empty body, and the about page that search engines still index returns a 404. A service built specifically to keep its members' details off the web has ended up as a hostname containing nothing at all.

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