YONDER.COM, a permaculture-friendly alternative to AirBnB

In the old days, it seemed like you had relatively few options for accommodations when traveling: Stay with family, friends, or friends-of-friends, camp, or stay in a hotel.  

In the early 2000’s, along came various platforms that opened up people’s own homes - Couchsurfing, AirBnB, VRBO. These were a big leap, because they opened up the playing field for the little guy to gain wide visibility, and they took a serious chunk out of the hospitality market.  I think the business buzz-word at the time was “industry disruptor.”

Yet many people had a rough time navigating all these mediums.  Here are a few reasons:

1. It was difficult to know if the place you were booking was an environment that would be healthy.  If you had any sensitivities to certain cleaners, mold, paint fumes, etc, you could never really know what you were getting into.  
2. If you were looking for a place to connect with nature, these platforms were not crafted to aid you in that search.  There were certainly some places that fit the bill, but they were needles in haystacks.  
3. If you value a light ecological footprint, there was literally no metric for that on the typical platforms.  Most were status quo - awful.


This week I learned about a relative new-comer in the crowd-sourcing accommodations market - Yonder.com.  What first struck me about Yonder was the way they refer to their listers.  They are not Hosts, but Stewards.  Every place is vetted for their commitment to regenerative agriculture, permaculture, and amazing, nature-oriented stay experiences.  

After spending way too many hours looking for the perfect stay for me and my family, I will now start my searches with Yonder.com.  

Cool! I will have to check this out for my next vacation.

Another promising eco-friendly airbnb alternative startup is fairbnb: https://fairbnb.coop based in Italy and expanding

If you travel by bicycle you can be guest or host to other bicycle travelers with https://www.warmshowers.org/.

And in the Netherlands we have Campspace, which is somewhat like Yonder: https://campspace.com/nl

And there’s wwoof, probably most everyone on permies knows about wwoofing, but it does belong on this list of potential lodgings.

Search wwoof and the name of the country where you are planning to  travel

Thekla McDaniels wrote:And there’s wwoof, probably most everyone on permies knows about wwoofing, but it does belong on this list of potential lodgings.

Search wwoof and the name of the country where you are planning to  travel

I don't think you can compare wwoof with those sites for holidays destinations. Wwoof is meant for people who want to WORK, not to have their vacation ...

A working vacation is still a vacation 😊.  And in my many years as a wwoof host, I had many a volunteer who was there with not much intention to work.

On the other hand, if I am planning to travel, I very much want to stay in each place for awhile, I want to get to know the people of the region, not be stuck in corporate culture tourism.  And I like to have meaningful work and quality food, so wwoofing is perfect for people like me when we want to go on vacation 😊.

Yonder and others are helpful to me in between wwoof gigs, and big city logistics.

Yes, and likewise, if you want to get involved in the place you want to visit, then workaway is another site. I recently browsed on it and found several permaculturey types of places around India and the Philippines, the first two countries I looked at.

Yonder looks like a good idea, seems beneficial to have some competition to the San Francisco billionaires in the arena. Unfortunately not only do they end up charging the host more in fees, but they do so using the stripe payment system. In my time in the gig economy, I found stripe to be the worst company to deal with.

As a contractor, I had claims of credit fraud from numerous customers. After submitting visual footage of services delivered, along with online records of the transactions, in each instance stripe denied my case without further explanation. Not only did they reverse the deposit of payment from the customer for services, but they withdrew money from my bank account without permission to pay them a fee for the honor.

If a major credit card company tells Stripe to jump, they will plant their boot on an independent contractor's face and ask "how high?"

Wow, good to know Croydon.  I never heard of stripe, but I want nothing to do with a company like that!

An I appreciate your willingness to share your experience.  I think that’s an important part of permaculture…. the principle of people care, or community care, whatever it’s called.