How This Works

What Are We GoingTo is a peer-to-peer delivery platform that connects two kinds of people: someone in the UK who needs to send an item to Zimbabwe, and someone who is already flying that route and has spare luggage space to carry it. Instead of using a traditional courier or freight company, which can be slow and expensive for small, personal, non-commercial items, GoingTo lets you arrange for your item to travel with someone you can speak to directly, who is making the trip anyway. The idea behind it is an old one, made more organised: for generations, people sending things home to family have relied on "does anyone know someone travelling" — a friend of a friend with a spare suitcase. GoingTo turns that into a searchable, structured platform, without becoming a shipping company itself. It does not employ couriers, does not own aircraft or cargo space, and does not take custody of anything you send. It is the introduction service; the arrangement itself happens between you and the other person. This matters for how you should think about using it, and it's covered in more detail in the trust and responsibility section further down — but the short version is that GoingTo connects people, and the two people involved are responsible for what happens next.

The Two Sides of the Platform

Everyone using GoingTo falls into one of two roles, and most people will only ever need one of them. **Senders** are people who want to get an item to someone in Zimbabwe — clothing, small electronics, gifts, documents, or anything else that's practical to carry in someone's luggage. A sender searches for upcoming trips, finds one going to the right destination around the right time, and arranges with the traveller to carry the item. **Travellers** are people who already have a flight booked to Zimbabwe and are willing to use some of their spare baggage allowance to carry an item for someone else, usually in exchange for a small payment agreed directly between the two of them. A traveller lists their trip on GoingTo — destination, date, and how much weight and space they have free — and then reviews requests from senders who want to use that space. You can be both. Plenty of people who travel home once or twice a year list their own trips when they're going, and also use the platform to receive items from relatives in the UK the rest of the time.

Creating an Account

To do anything beyond searching, you'll need to register. Registration asks for your first name, email address, a mobile number (with a country code selector, so both UK and Zimbabwean numbers work properly), your location, and a password. After you submit the form, GoingTo sends a six-digit verification code to the email address you provided, and you'll need to enter that code before your account is fully active — this is mainly to confirm the email address is real and belongs to you, since that email is how trip and product notifications reach you later. If the code doesn't arrive, there's a "send again" option rather than having to restart registration. Once verified, you can log in at any time with your email and password. There's a "show password" toggle on both the registration and login screens so you can check what you've typed before submitting, which matters more than it sounds given how easy it is to mistype a password on a phone keyboard.

If You Want to Send Something

The homepage search is built around the one route GoingTo currently operates: UK to Zimbabwe. You'll pick a departure airport from a dropdown of major UK airports (Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester, Birmingham, and so on) and an arrival airport in Zimbabwe (Harare, Bulawayo, Victoria Falls, Kariba, and the other active Zimbabwean airports), then search. This returns a list of upcoming trips that match, each showing the destination, the date, and the traveller's weight limit. If there's nothing available for the destination and dates you need, you're not just shown an empty page — you're offered a "notify me" option instead. You leave your email address against that destination, and if a trip to that destination is added later, GoingTo emails you automatically so you don't have to keep checking back manually. When you find a trip that works, opening it shows you the full detail: date, destination, available space, weight limit, and a note that price varies (since the amount a sender pays a traveller is agreed between the two of them, not fixed by the platform). From here you have two options. You can tap "Call" to reveal the traveller's phone number directly and speak to them before committing to anything, or you can go ahead and "Join this Flight," which opens a short form asking for the product name, destination, weight, size, value, and a description, plus you can attach photos of the item. Submitting that form doesn't book anything automatically — it sends a request to the traveller, who can accept or decline it (more on that below). If they accept, you're taken to a short checkout step where you provide your postcode, address, mobile number, and email, so the two of you have what you need to actually arrange the handover. You'll then get a confirmation email letting you know your request has gone through and that the traveller will be in touch. Separately from trips, GoingTo also has a **Packages** section, which is a running list of items other senders currently want carried to a given destination, independent of any specific trip. If you're the one travelling and want to see what's actually waiting to be sent to where you're going, this is where you'd look — you can search by destination, see the description and what the sender is offering to pay, and call them directly if one of the items suits your trip.

If You're Travelling and Have Space to Spare

If you've got a flight booked to Zimbabwe and some baggage allowance you're not using, you create a trip. This asks for the date you're travelling, your current location, how much space you have available (in cubic metres), and your weight limit, plus the destination. Once submitted, your trip becomes searchable to anyone looking to send something on that route, and — if anyone had previously asked to be notified about a trip to that destination — GoingTo automatically emails them to let them know a new one has just gone up. From that point, you manage everything from your My Trips area. Each trip you've listed shows there, and you can edit its details, view it, or delete it if your plans change. When someone requests to send an item on your trip, it shows up against that trip for you to review: you see the product name, description, weight, size, and value, and you decide to accept or decline. If you decline, that's the end of it for that request. If you accept, the sender's contact number becomes visible to you (and yours is only shared once you've accepted, not before) so you can arrange the actual handover — where, when, and how the item gets to you before your flight. You can also proactively invite senders rather than waiting for requests: from a trip's management page there's an "Invite" option that shows you the packages currently waiting for a route matching your destination, so you can reach out first if one looks like a fit.

How Contact Actually Works

Throughout the platform, phone numbers are not shown publicly by default — you have to actively tap "Call" (or, once a request is accepted, the number becomes visible on the request itself) before a number is revealed, and from there you get direct call and WhatsApp buttons. This is deliberate: it means casual browsing doesn't expose anyone's number, but as soon as two people are seriously about to arrange something, they have a direct line to each other rather than having to go back and forth through the platform.

money

This is worth being explicit about: GoingTo does not process payments. There is no "pay now" button, no card details are ever taken by the platform, and no money passes through GoingTo at any point. Where a sender agrees to pay a traveller for carrying an item, that payment is arranged and made directly between the two of them, by whatever method they agree on — bank transfer, cash, or anything else. GoingTo has no visibility into that transaction and no involvement in it.

Trust, Responsibility, and What GoingTo Doesn't Cover

GoingTo is a matching service, not a courier company, and it's important to go in understanding exactly what that means in practice. The arrangement to send, carry, and deliver an item is made directly between the sender and the traveller, based on the trust the two of them build with each other — through conversation, through the details shared, through whatever checks they choose to do. GoingTo does not inspect, verify, weigh, insure, or take custody of anything at any point, and it does not guarantee that an item carried through the platform will actually reach its destination, arrive on time, or arrive undamaged. If something goes missing, is delayed, or turns up damaged, that is a matter between the sender and the traveller — GoingTo does not mediate disputes and does not accept liability for the outcome. Because of this, whether you're sending or carrying, it's worth treating this the way you'd treat any arrangement with someone you don't already know well: talk to the other person before you commit, understand what exactly you're being asked to carry (or send), and don't send or accept anything you wouldn't be comfortable being responsible for. Never send prohibited, illegal, or restricted items — the platform doesn't check package contents, so that responsibility sits with the people involved, and carrying something that breaches customs or airline rules is a real legal risk for the traveller specifically, not just an abstract one.

Using GoingTo as an App

Everything described above is available both on the GoingTo website and as an installable app version, which works the same way but is designed to feel like a native mobile app — a bottom navigation bar for jumping between search, packages, your trips, and your profile, and it can be added to your phone's home screen so it opens like any other app, without needing to go through an app store. It also keeps working with a basic offline view if your connection drops, since the core screens are cached on your device once you've opened them.

A Few Practical Things Worth Knowing

Registration and login are separate from actually browsing — you can search for trips and packages without an account, but you'll need to be logged in to create a trip, manage your trips, or accept and decline requests as a traveller. The email address you register with is where all notifications land, including trip acceptance/decline updates and "a new trip to your destination has been added" alerts, so it's worth using one you check regularly. And because GoingTo currently only operates the UK-to-Zimbabwe route, that's reflected directly in the search screen rather than being a limitation you discover partway through — the departure and destination options are both fixed to airports on that route.