QueerTravel: Visualizing Social Safety Enriched with Community Experiences to Support Travel Decisions
Authors
Başak Oral (Utrecht University), Alexandru Telea (Utrecht University), Evanthia Dimara (Utrecht University)
Presentation
- Session
- Story time
- Time
- Thursday, Nov 12, 08:36 – 08:48 (US/Eastern) · session 08:00 – 09:30
- Location
- Hall America north
Keywords
Decision Making, Queer, Input Visualization, Data Feminism, Design Study, Interaction, Multi-Criteria Decision Making.
Abstract
Social safety plays a critical role in queer travel, as discrimination at destinations can lead to restrained expression, exclusion, or physical harm. Yet information relevant to safer travel decisions remains fragmented across formal sources, personal networks, and unstructured online accounts. To address this gap, we conducted a design study with queer participants to investigate how social safety is perceived in travel decision making, what information is missing from existing resources, and how community experiences can complement formal data. Based on these insights, we developed QueerTravel, an interactive visualization tool that combines curated social safety indicators with community-contributed experiences for 203 countries. The system supports overview, comparison, and inspection through coordinated map-based, tabular, and comparative views, enabling users to examine destinations across criteria such as same-sex marriage laws, transgender legal status, morality laws, and violence-related indicators alongside structured, location-specific accounts of lived experiences. In a subsequent study, participants used QueerTravel to reason about destinations under social safety considerations and reflect on the value, limits, and sensitivities of combining institutional and experiential evidence in one decision-support environment. Our work contributes insights into designing multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) visualization tools for queer travel safety, showing how experiential knowledge can complement formalized data and shifting attention from risk and vulnerability toward participation and empowerment of marginalized populations. Supplementary materials are available at https://osf.io/2mvb4/overview?view_only=3db8245eccf44c929d3e2de17d63a3c4X.
For Practitioners
Visualization and UX designers, People working on travel and travel safety tools, People working in LGBTQ+ organizations and community platforms. Practitioners can use our findings to design more transparent and personalized decision-support tools that combine official data with community experiences.