Fairbnb: a sustainable alternative to Airbnb
Enter Fairbnb, the cooperative accommodation booking platform that ensures its positive impact on the communities by promoting and funding local initiatives and projects. Travel Tomorrow’s Eme Johnson explains.
“We prioritise people over profit and facilitate authentic, sustainable and intimate travel experiences while facilitating the development of socially relevant projects within worldwide communities”
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About Fairbnb
Promoting the idea to ‘Be the Change where you live and where you go!’, Fairbnb describe themselves as ‘a non extractive alternative to the current vacation rental platforms’. Created in 2016, the movement first started in Venice, Amsterdam and Bologna, with other groups soon joining from all over Europe. […]. Fairbnb is a community of activists, coders, researchers and designers that want to put the ‘share’ back into the sharing economy.
The negative impacts of accommodation booking platforms
There are many advantages to platforms offering short-term holiday rentals, such as Airbnb. They are a great way to travel affordably and to have unique travel experiences and locals can supplement their income as well as share their culture. However, this model can also come at a cost to the destination, bringing negative impacts with it. It can drive up real estate prices, fragment communities and close local businesses, and in many cities, technology-driven tourism is making it harder for the locals who live there to manage their own neighbourhoods.
How Fairbnb is changing this
Fairbnb is an online platform that enables hosts and guests to connect for meaningful travel and cultural exchange, but at the same time makes efforts to minimise the costs this brings to the destinations’ communities. It is a community-centred alternative that ‘prioritises people over profit and facilitates authentic, sustainable and intimate travel experiences while facilitating the development of socially relevant projects within worldwide communities’.
How Fairbnb works
Fairbnb uses 50% of their platform fee to maintain its operations and the other 50% to fund projects in the communities people visit, giving guests the choice of which project they would like to fund, and both hosts and guests the opportunity to participate in a more equitable and sustainable tourism model. These social projects ensure social sustainability, countering the negative effects of tourism and enabling locals to vote to support the projects they want to see in their own neighbourhoods, from food co-ops to playgrounds, green projects to community cafes and much more. […].
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Get involved
Whether you are a holiday maker or a host looking to offer your guests meaningful travel and cultural exchange, or someone looking to invest in a project that is making a difference, there are several ways you can get involved with Fairbnb. The platform offers a fair, collectively-owned and transparent alternative to other accommodation sharing platforms. In the words of Fairbnb themselves, ‘We invite all travellers and citizens concerned by the negative effects of unchecked tourism to join us in co-creating a community platform that promotes travel that is extraordinary… and ethical’.
This is an excerpt from an article originally written by Eme Johnson and published by Travel Tomorrow.
