Our approach
Nobody should spend three hours alone in a terminal.
Wingmate shows you who else is stuck in your terminal or booked on your flight, across 45 European airports. No faces until you both choose, no seat numbers until you both agree. Profiles disappear when you land. It is built to end at the gate, not to keep you on the app.
How we do itHow it works
Three rules, enforced on the server.
Not settings you can forget to turn on, and not something the interface politely declines to draw. One function decides what any passenger may know about another, and every route that returns a person goes through it — so a route cannot accidentally leak a face or a seat.
01
Verified passengers only
A real booking, and an ID check before you can reveal a photo. You appear only to people in your terminal who are open to at least one of the same things you are.
02
Mutual reveal, always
A photo unblurs when you have both revealed to each other. Until then it is not hidden with CSS — the server never sends it. You have an hour to take a reveal back.
03
Nothing outlives the trip
Your seat stays hidden until the reveal is mutual. Your check-in deletes itself an hour after boarding, the rest goes two hours after you land, and a chat survives only if you both ask to keep it.
Your card
Say one real thing.
One prompt shows on your card, and it does more work than a photograph ever will. Type it however it comes out, or tap a few keywords — Wingmate writes it back three ways and you pick the one that sounds least like a stranger. Nothing about it has to be clever. It has to be true.
- Sounds like you
- A little drier
- Straight to the point
“Two weeks off-grid in the Alentejo. I want one good coffee and one good conversation before the wifi dies.” That is the whole pitch.
Wingmate Labs
We study how strangers meet.
Our researchers and behavioural analysts spend their days in departure lounges, working out what actually starts a conversation and what makes someone put their phone face-down. Everything they learn goes back into the card, the prompts, and who you are shown to. We have gotten pretty good at it.
Read the researchIn the terminal
Deals that need two people.
Coffee, wine, ramen, and the least sad sandwich in the building. A Wingmate deal unlocks only when two of you arrive together and show both phones at the till — because the point was never to sit alone with a discount.
See what is onWhat passengers say
We had ninety minutes at Gate B32 and I was about to spend all of them on my phone. We are flying to Lisbon together next month.
Thank you Wingmate! We swapped seats on a flight to Athens and have not really stopped talking since.
The card does the work. I knew what someone was actually like before I ever saw their face — and I liked that it all disappeared when we landed.
Work at Wingmate
Let’s work together.
We are looking for people who want dating to end at the gate, not in the app — engineers, designers and researchers who would rather build the thing you delete.
See open rolesPress
Get the app
Check in before you fly.
Sign in with your email — we send a four-digit code, and there are no passwords. Fill your trip in once and your card shows the right terminal, gate and boarding time; the seat stays private. You see only people checked in to the same terminal, and only while your flight is still ahead of you. In English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian or French.