From the very beginning, our pilot cities include some of Europe’s most popular tourist destinations, such as Venice, Amsterdam and Barcelona. In recent times we have extended our presence to other major capitals, such as Paris, Berlin and Rome, as well as the beautiful seaside villages of Liguria.

However, we want to #bethechange in the way people travel, we believe that our Community Powered Tourism can increasingly enable entire communities to be empowered by tourism. That’s why in the coming weeks we’ll be activating not only new cities but entire regions and nations! Check out the map of active and activating destinations on our community webpage, and read our newsletters to stay up-to-date: the next Fairbnb.coop flag could be rising in the destination of your dreams or, better yet, in your own city.

In the meantime, we are working hard to offer a platform that is increasingly functional and in tune with the needs of our communities. The latest innovation is the ability for hosts to synchronize their availability calendars with other platforms, so they always stay up to date. But the team in charge of developing our product is also insatiable, and soon we’ll be able to offer you much more than just a cozy vacation rental for your next getaway… Stay tuned!

The ferment that animates our team seems to be contagious, and so partnerships are multiplying with other organizations around the world that, like us, care about participation and sustainability in our communities. Even big newspapers like The Independent have noticed, and recently dedicated an article to Fairbnb.coop with interviews with some of our co-founders. Also aware of this are the many followers who wait for our blogs and content on social networks: since the beginning of our summer campaign #TravelFair, in mid-July, we have reached over a million people!

We also thank you for your continued support. Please keep following us, and remember to book your next vacation rentals on Fairbnb.coop!

The Fairbnb.coop Team

Every month we publish the latest news from our organizational areas. Let us remind you that all our managers are available for questions, so if you need some details or if you want to discuss some opportunities with them please don’t hold back: mail to info@fairbnb.coop.

Enjoy your read, let us know your thoughts and thank you for your support.

News update from Community – Lead: Domenico Di Siena

Sharing information with ambassadors
Thanks to the intense work carried out during the last weeks by our product area, we finally have the first version of dashboard available for ambassadors, who can know in real-time the situation of their local node, then consult the main information regarding registered hosts, bookings and support for local community projects.

News update from the Coop Ecosystem

Team: Jonathan Reyes (lead), Federico Piovesan (partnerships office)

Our activities to keep expanding our presence and complementing our activities keeps evolving through our growing network of partners and collaborators. From our partnerships office, we keep working to coordinate our relations and joint ventures with other organizations. We are talking to different national cooperative federations, public institutions, similar complementary products and global activist networks to walk together for a better cooperative impact!

Do you know any other organization, project or network with shared vision and values you think we should know or relate to? Please get in touch with us on partnerships@fairbnb.coop!

Here are some of our last updates from Parnterships:

Placemaking X
PlacemakingX is a global network that aims to create healthy, inclusive, and beloved communities. They are present in many countries around the world, from where they are promoting a more participatory and sustainable city-making that engages both public, private and civil organizations in defining the future of their public spaces.
With a shared vision and conviction on the pivotal role our public spaces play in community engagement and societal development, we are proud to announce our collaboration and common activities described in our shared manifesto.
Holidays Exchange
We are very proud to announce that we onboarded Holidays Exchange Coop team as part of our cooperative. Their cooperative approach and experience on creating home exchange services for cooperative hosts will be very valuable to support our process to prepare our Mid Term and Home Exchange platform as well as to reassure our cooperative approach.
Needsmap
Needsmap is a cooperative platform from Turkey where people in need of something can connect with those who can help them around the country. Their extensive experience, their cooperative vision and their huge network in Turkey makes them our perfect partner to start the national operations in the country. We are very proud and happy to announce the beginning of our joint venture to activate Fairbnb.coop Turkey in the upcoming months.

#PR
Fairbnb.coop at VILLAE – Transforming an Italian heritage baroque villa into a collaborative and creative hub for the circular economy
Last 23rd and 24th of July we had the pleasure to be invited by Volumes and Villae NGO to take part in an international co-design workshop in Italy to think about how to transform, together with other projects and locals, an Italian XVIII century villa into a creative Hub for circular economy and collective entrepreneurship. Villa Buonaccorsi is a heritage site situated on the Mediterranean hills of the Adriatic coast in the Marche region, in the center of Italy. The site of 5 hectares includes more than 30 buildings and perfectly preserved baroque gardens.
About one year ago, the private real-estate company which owned the Villa went bankrupt and the Villa went on auction sale. Villae NGO and Volumes organized this international camp with the mission of preserving the Villa, bringing it back to the commons During the event, we worked together with locals to trace the foundations for a territorial activation and resilience strategy having regenerative tourism as a driving force and the baroque villa as its focal point.

News update from the Product Area: – Lead : Jan De Bock

The product team focused last month mainly on 3 elements:

1. We are making the necessary changes to the Short Term Rental booking platform to make it more customer-friendly and ready for a wider rollout. The main, much desired new functionality is the calendar synchronization. By the time you read this blog, it will have been released. From now on you can sync multiple calendars into a listing’s agenda and you can export the fairbnb.coop calendar for use in other systems.
2. We published an analytics environment, based on an open-source product “Metabase”. All ambassadors and several teams have targeted dashboards at their disposal. The goal is to improve transparency and to make everybody more self-sufficient in their realm of responsibilities.
3. We are defining our longer-term strategy for the platforms: how will our organization look like, who will be our development partner, what technology will we use, what are our processes. Those processes will include feedback loops from our internal organization as well as our customers. Once we have a clear view of all the above, we will discuss, define and publish a roadmap on features with expected release dates.

Thanks for your continuous feedback. It helps to create a more performant, user-friendly environment.

News update from the Marketing Area – Lead : Emanuele Dal Carlo / Isabel Duregger

Travel Kollekt
We are excited to announce a new service for our Fair Hosts, thanks to our collaboration with Travel Kollekt – featured as “UNWTO Top 100 Tourism Startup & Innovators” and “The best innovation since Lonely Planet” according to Business Punk Magazine.
This initiative will allow us to offer our Hosts the access to an amazing online Travel Guide platform to create unique “Welcome Books” for their Guests. The tool helps Hosts to transform their local knowledge into tailored travel information for their Guests and thanks to our Marketing collaboration, Fair Hosts can use the special Fairbnb.coop discount if they choose to purchase the printed book version. We have created Fairbnb.coop brand pages and a special cover design which can easily be used when creating their own “Welcome Book”.
Additionally, we will join forces to promote sustainable travel and spread our mission among the Travel Kollekt Community.

Quick Summer Campaign Recap
We have launched our summer campaign with the motto – travel with your values in July. As mentioned in our last update we have created a campaign ecosystem featuring videos, engagement and conversion posts, blogs, and content tailored to individual destinations and pushed all deliverables through organic and paid media. We also created a Facebook Quizz to engage our community and linked it to our booking platform.

Until now we have reached 1.182.174 people and generated 4.312.851 impressions. We slightly reached more women with our campaign with a clear peak in the segment of 55-64 years old via our campaign video and a significant higher reach on Facebook. Our next step is to generate further learning from our activities and use them for our upcoming campaign tailored to Hosts.

I spoke to them from their first in-person meeting since the pandemic began, and their excitement was contagious. – Emily Manthei

In her article, she mentions the negative development of conventional home-sharing platforms and discusses the benefits of the “true sharing economy”. Furthermore, the article also recapped the recent development of the coop and featured images of the summer campaign.

Click here to read the full article.

General Direction – Lead: Alessandro Rocchi

Fair Lab Operative Plan
The team identified the four main operative goals of the Fair Lab:

1. Deepening Sustainability;
2. Tools for hosts and people;
3. Emilia Romagna Local Nodes Activation;
4. Fairlab-as-a-service.

They include preparing a draft proposal of fairbnb.coop manifesto, bringing sustainability to the ‘people’ living in the communities where we are active (and not only to our hosts and guests), experimenting and activating new areas in Emilia-Romagna, and transforming the Fair Lab in a service that can inform the actions of the entire Coop. The resulting operative plan will be presented to the BoD and, later on, to the entire Fairbnb team during the October reunion.

Connector agreement
A draft of the possible agreement has been prepared for collaboration with Connectors, a new subject with different backgrounds and goals, needed to increase the fairbnb.coop community.

New local node in Napoli
A new agreement as local ambassador has been signed between fairbnb.coop and Cooperativa Inn who is now our new local node for Napoli.

New social projects signed
Cuneo, Istria, Spain, a lot of new social projects have been signed and they are now ready to be on the platform and start receiving donations.

Social project language issue

The LAs pointed out that often the social project legal representative doesn’t speak English and so they don’t want to sign the crowdfunding. The proposal is to have a sworn translation if needed. the issue is now under the discussion of the BoD. We also have the problem of not translated social project explanations, we discussed that with the community area and a proposal of an English summary signed by our ambassador needs to be approved.

Content Digest

For many of us, returning from vacation means putting into practice those changes we promised ourselves we would make while traveling, exploring new territories, swimming or climbing a mountain. These are experiences during which it is easy to devise new projects and dream of a different life full of new emotions: since September we change, many people say.
But then, back home, we are overwhelmed by the tasks of everyday life and we risk putting aside all our aspirations. For this reason, with our summer campaign we have invited you to make the changes already during the vacations. How? By making sustainable travel choices, continuing to be consistent with your values and supporting the communities you visit.