Matt Leedham meets Agnes Abelsen, the Norwegian-born founder of Sydney-based neurodivergent youth travel company Travengers AU, to talk startup origins, 600-plus clients, a late ADHD diagnosis, and why the next chapter of neurodivergent travel, including her new Divergence Travel venture, needs the Australian trade in the room.
Agnes Abelsen is proudly telling me about two young women who met on a Travengers AU group trip to Florida and have become close friends ever since.
On paper, that might simply read like any new friendship born out of a shared holiday. Except these are two young neurodivergent Australians for whom international travel had, for most of their lives, been quietly written off as out of reach.
Until they found the right support to do it anyway.
Travengers AU, the Sydney-based social enterprise Abelsen founded in 2020, designs group trips, social meet-up events and travel experiences for 18-35-year-old neurodivergent Australians. It now runs hubs in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, with a growing international departure calendar and a second venture, Divergence Travel, which has recently launched.
An island in Norway, sister Elise, and a plane ticket Down-Under
Abelsen grew up on Senja, Norway’s second-largest island, with her autistic younger sister Elise. She trained as a disability nurse and spent 14 years in the sector, watching Elise want the same independence as every other young person her age, and not get it. When Abelsen landed in Sydney in 2017, she fell hard for travelling. Yet the contrast against her sisters’ travel options bothered her greatly.
“I moved from Norway to Australia, and I had fallen in love with travelling,” says Abelsen. “And then I saw how my sister, Elise, who is autistic, wasn’t empowered to have those same opportunities. She wanted to be independent and have the same opportunities as other young people, and she simply didn’t.”
Frustrated with the lack of opportunities for young people with hidden disabilities, Abelsen says her mission was realised.
“I wanted to connect people and give them opportunities to travel and enjoy life.”
Travengers AU launched in Sydney in 2020, just before the travel industry went into lockdown. Despite the unfortunate timing, Abelsen kept going, and the business has since expanded into Melbourne and Brisbane, assembled a team of more than 20 and built an expert advisory board that helps steer the business’s mission with the right values and momentum.
The business has been a finalist in the 2021 Business NSW Outstanding Young Business Leader category and the 2022 NSW Tourism Awards, has been profiled on ABC’s 7.30, and has received funding from the international tourism non-profit UnTours Foundation, with backing from Expedia. Abelsen herself has been named a Global Change-Maker by Condé Nast Traveller.
700 events, 600 clients, and life-changing trips
To date, Travengers AU has now delivered around 700 social events locally and internationally and served more than 600 young Australians, Abelsen tells me.
Locally, the programs range widely. Low-key meet-ups, community catch-ups, even a gaming club, all anchored by local Travengers guides across Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane whose job is to lower the social bar to entry. “We just try to be creative,” says Abelsen.
The bigger trips, though, are where the transformations happen. For many Travengers AU clients, a group flight to Tokyo, Italy, or Florida is their first time boarding a plane.
“It’s extra special going on those big ones,” says Abelsen. “A lot of them wouldn’t have thought that they could ever do that, because often they’ve been told that they can’t.”
A late diagnosis, a new lens
Abelsen first suspected her own ADHD in 2022 and was formally diagnosed in 2024. The revelation, she says, reshaped her professional lens as much as her personal one.
“I realised there wasn’t anywhere that other women going through the same thing could just meet people without feeling judged, and having to put a mask on,” says Abelsen.
Here’s where we find common ground. Like Abelsen, I was late-diagnosed myself in my forties, the penny dropping alongside my eldest son’s diagnosis. One of those aha moments. But a gift, we agree, more than a label.
For Abelsen, going public with her own story has opened the floodgates.
“So many women have shared their story with me since I shared mine,” she tells me. But sadly, fearing acceptance had been what was holding them back, Abelsen says, “They were kind of almost saying, in a way, that they were a bit ashamed of having ADHD.”
The next chapter: Divergence Travel for Women
Abelsen’s second venture has a name and a release year. Divergence Travel launched this year as curated group travel experiences built exclusively for Millennial and Gen X women with ADHD, AuDHD (the combination of autism and ADHD) and other forms of neurodivergence. Abelsen says it is, to her knowledge, a world first.
The tagline says it all. Adventure, Designed for Your Nervous System.
“I’ve been fearing that I would end up in a situation or group where it felt like I had to perform,” Abelsen tells me of similar groups and travel she’d tried elsewhere. “And doing that over multiple days is exhausting.”
Divergence Travel is, in many ways, the trip Abelsen wishes had existed when she started looking for it.
“I built Travengers for people like my sister. I’m building Divergence Travel for people like me,” she says.
“The late-diagnosed ADHD and AuDHD women who have spent years masking just to be accepted, and still never quite feeling like enough. Those who love to travel but have found it overwhelming, chaotic, or stressful. And for those who are craving to meet women who just get it, without explanation or judgment. We’re here for all of them.”
Early gatherings have been telling. “The deep chats were just going straight away, and it’s just clicking really immediately,” she says.
Why the trade needs to be at the table
Remarkably, to date, Travengers AU has not worked directly with Australian travel advisors. Abelsen cites the detailed support frameworks Travengers builds into every trip, some of which are NDIS-funded for clients who use them. That, she tells me, is a gap worth closing.
The conversation around neurodivergence in the Australian trade has started to open up, but only ever when someone is brave enough to begin one. Abelsen is building a product that the trade simply doesn’t have, for a client base most advisors already know in their own books. The next move has to be collaboration.
For advisors working in premium, purpose-led or family travel, Travengers and the new Divergence Travel are two businesses to know about. Abelsen says she’s open to trade partnerships, as long as the right support frameworks can be built in around them.
Something else strikes me that’s very relatable, listening to her. Travengers sounds like the name of a group of superheroes. That’s about right. Each traveller brings their own edge, their own kind of brilliance. A travelling Guardians of the Galaxy, Australian-built, with Abelsen as the woman who put the team together.
As the call winds down, I circle back to the two friends in Florida. The ones who built lives of their own after a Travengers trip lit the fuse.
“They might not need [Travengers] as much anymore, which is ultimately the goal as well,” Abelsen says.
To find out more about Travengers AU, visit travengers.com.au. To find out more about Divergence Travel, visit divergencetravel.com.au. To contact Agnes directly, you can reach her via LinkedIn here.
