Travel experiences represent enjoyable periods in one's life, but also offer opportunities for thoughtful reflection and personal growth. To facilitate these insights and enhance self-understanding, we developed TravelTales, a smartphone app designed to support storytelling through scrapbooking and reflection through guided journal questions. The development of the app followed a human-centred design approach, starting from design space formulation to initial formative interviews (n = 23) that further explored the concept of meaningful travel. Our initial findings frame travel as a fleeting life experience that challenges one's usual position in space and time, accelerating personal growth. To understand how people narrate their travels to derive such growth, we deployed TravelTales in a probing field study with travellers (n = 8), finding that TravelTales fosters promising outcomes related to personal reflection, remembrance, and self-learning. Finally, we discuss the implications of our work in designing to support reflection and enhance travel experiences.
Yin et al. (Sat,) studied this question.