The Story Behind Sustaying

This is the story behind Sustaying. We are getting more conscious about the way we live, and we are also more aware of how we travel. There is a lot to gain in terms of sustainability and community in this area and Sustaying wants to make it a little bit easier to make the right choices for travellers.

The problem of the travel industry today

The world is scattered with places to stay for travellers; from hammocks on a beach in Thailand to a private villa in a resort on an island in the Maldives. Most travellers book their accommodation based on reviews from others, which shows they highly value their peer’s opinion. But none of these reviews on for example TripAdvisor include a rating to measure the environmental or community impact of these stays. Hotels and guesthouses can leave a massive environmental footprint on our natural and human world, and guests don’t even know these impacts before they book.

Most of the hotels and guesthouses are being booked through platforms like booking.com and expedia.com, which means that local lodging owners without internet have basically no chance to compete.

Luckily, people nowadays are much more aware of their own contribution to protect the world and want their money to be used for better, more environmental-friendly products and services. The story behind Sustaying is to create a platform just like TripAdvisor that can provide all the information a traveller needs to make a better choice. Our mission is also to bring more awareness to the accommodation themselves to be more sustainable.

Sustaying wants to make it easier to find sustainable stays

Sustaying is a crowd-sourcing platform just like TripAdvisor, but we only focus on sustainability reviews. Any stay can be added to our database, even if it’s not considered sustainable. The reviews that are added by guests will eventually reflect how sustainable a stay really is. Guests will fill out a questionnaire with questions in different categories: Community, Environment, Planet and Awareness.

The answers to these questions will give the stay a sustainability rating which is visible to the public. This way you can select your accommodation based on what is most important to you. The stay doesn’t need to be part of any ‘eco-friendly’ programs (which are often prone to greenwashing and are expensive to be part of) to reflect their sustainability.

This way the local grandfather running his little boutique guesthouse in Tibet will have the same chance as one of the 1000s of franchised hotels around the world with massive revenues.

Do you want to add a stay? It’s completely free!