About Us

Mayday was founded in 2022 by James Dunford Wood and Ivan Lowe. Ivan is a chemical engineer and James is a serial entrepreneur and long time traveller, and what brought them together on Mayday was the shared frustration of parents at the repeated stolen phone dramas of their offspring. Finally fed up with tracing banking ID numbers to reactivate banking apps, or searching for dog-eared statements to find lost credit card numbers, in December 2021 James mocked up a proof of concept Google document for storing vital back-up information, accessed by a unique QR code, together with a local help message in Spanish, for a daughter’s travels around South America. The QR code was printed and taped to a key fob, and proved its worth within six weeks when a phone was stolen - again! - and documents retrieved.

Granted, our children are clearly disorganised. But how many of us are the same? If nothing else, Mayday provides a useful prompt to get things sorted before we go away.

The idea was given further impetus when we heard from a parent who had tragically lost a son while travelling in Cambodia, due to a delay in treatment because no travel insurance documents were found on him. Although this was a one in a million tragedy, anything we can do to help keep travellers safe, to get the help they need more quickly, has to be a good thing. So Mayday was born. Our mission is simple: to keep travellers safe, organised, and their friends and family at ease.

Be prepared, and happy travels.

James & Ivan