Fairbnb.coop: Sustainable Tourism for a Real Sharing Economy

Fairbnb.coop is a platform cooperative that let users rent and book accomodations sustainably, solving some of the present distortion of the "sharing economy". Existing travel platform exacerbate gentrification and overtourism, with single hosts are putting tens of apartments on the short term market instead of the residential one. Also this platform extract billions of dollars in form of commissions or data. Fairbnb.coop works like the other platforms but let the travellers give half of the commission to a social project. In this way traveler pay the same, host earn the same but there's a benefit for the whole community. The platform promote the idea of fairhost with the rule "One host, One house" in overtouristic places, excluding megahosts that inflate most market.
Connecting thousands of projects all around the world Fairbnb.coop creates a glocal network that can foster real solidarity economy!

Fairbnb.coop solve 2 main problems:
1) The touristification of our cities
2) The extraction of value by existing sharing economy

Existing P2P accomodation platforms became a tool for speculators.
The initial idea of renting spare rooms or the second appartment was distored and now there're companies that buy entire buildings putting them for short-term rentals, there're landlords that converted hundreads of appartments from residential to touristic.
For this reason many cities experienced a drammatic increase in cost of accomodations, this process is driving middle class out of the center of the cities that are progressively losing their soul to pursue an unsustainable touristic model.
On the other hand our cities, our organizations and our communities need to find resources for the Commons: existing platform extract value in term of commissions or data, without giving anything back to local people (paying little or no taxes). Toursim account for almost 10% of global GDP, our objective is use part of this value to power a solidarity economy that can benefit the people and the planet.

We expect with 5% of market share in 2025 to give 200 million each year to communities.

Our initiative promote shared prosperity and it benefit everyone! Fairbnb.coop is based on principles like equity, solidarity and brotherhood, this mean that the platform is a tool for network empowerment.

Every city will have at least 3 community projects related to environment, social housing, art, etc. In every city we facilitate the formation of a local node: an inclusive group of people and organizations that meet to experiment, propose projects, promote Fairbnb.coop and rethink our cities. In general Fairbnb.coop is not only a platform for travellers, it's a platform that allow to cooperate and collaborate at a city level and at a global level to change our world and rethink what does it mean to live in the 21th century.

Our project is community and human centered, the solutions to the most urgent challenges need to be find together, technology can help, but humans are those that can really make the difference. Fairbnb.coop offer a coherent path to create, experiment and demand change.

Fairbnb.coop is both a platform and a movement. As a platform Fairbnb.coop offers the possibility to rent and book appartments and rooms with the same confort of the other platform.

The platform keeps 15% on every transaction (like other platforms), half of it is used to sustain the costs of the cooperative and the other half goes in the "social wallet" of the traveller that can donate it to one of the community project where he travelled. Community projects are choosen by local nodes with the help of an ethic commission. The experience for the user is simple: book an appartment, travel and fund a project you like!

The hosts will have another source of income while differenciate from other non-fairhosts.

Guests will find amazing accomodation and their travel will have also a purpose.

Community projects will enter in a glocal network with thousands of other initiatives. With 4% of the market in Bologna Italy (150 apartments) every year it will be possible to fund 12 projects with 15.000 euro! In the coming 24 months fairbnb.coop will replicate the model worldwide giving everyone the opportunity to find amazing houses everywhere that fits the economic and ethics value of the travellers. In very touristic cities people will have the chance to go to appartments that don't contribute to create gentrification, the platform in this way become a tool for local administration to show that another model is possible!

Our business model is simple, from one hand we offer the same confort of existing platform, from the other hand we create a glocal network that give purpose to our platform and to everyone that use it.

Platforms have become the infrastucture of the economy, there's an increasing niche that think that this infrastructure should serve the Common good and not only the interest of the share holders.

From a financial point of view our model promote the partecipation of hundreads of small investors that can make a fair-earning by entering in the cooperative (soci sovventori=inverstors members).

So we innovate both for our user experience (Booking+crowdfunding) and for our organization structure (cooperative centralized in bologna and distributed everywhere with local nodes).

Our platform is using Open Source technology and will create an API system that will help to create more and more partnerships with partners and community projects.

People are demanding for change, people need to find valid alternatives that work and that respect their values.
We apply platform strategy and values to create the best platform for everyone!

At the moment 1000 pre-registered hosts and 6000 pre-registered guests, also there're 250 contributors that are partecipating in our collaborative tools to activate local nodes.
Our objective in the coming 12 months is to reach 24.000 hosts and 55.000 guests.
In 5 years our objective is to reach 350.000 hosts and 2 millions of travellers.

Our goal is to launch in all Europe and Japan (for Olypic games). In 5/6 years we aim to reach 5% of the market share giving back 200 millions dollars to social project world wide, creating a network that help hundreads of thousands of people worldwide to live better, create an alternative economy and demand change.

Our first barrier is to reach the critical mass, we need to scale by replicating and adapting the model fast and existing financials tools are not very adeguate for our initiative. At the moment we are receiving funding from the cooperative world, with some traction they are going to fund us with enough resources to scale worldwide.
To reach our long term goal we will need to balance inclusion and efficiency creating governance tools to manage the worldwide network.

The cooperative mutual fund in Italy are very powerful (10% of Italian GDP is made by cooperative), even if they took their time all the major funding and organizations (Legacoop and Confcooperative) understood the social and economical potential of our initiative.
At the moment we are receiving enough funding to prove our model and with some traction in 2020 we hope to receive 5 million euro to scale and reinforce Fairbnb.coop everywhere.
We are working on the governance part with worldwide experts from Loomio (enspiral) and other organizations (ouishare,civicwise, etc.).

We are a Cooperative Startup.

5 full time, 4 part time, 30 active contributors.

We are a very mixed team (age 26-63), we come from very different backgrounds and different location.

Our competences are sinergic and our differences are our strenght.

We have more than 20 partners in Europe and over 150 requests of becoming partners.
Partners help us to set new local nodes and promote Fairbnb.coop worldwide.

Our model is simple, we keep 15% and use half of it for expenses.
The other half (7.5%) is used to fund social projects, this is not a dead cost but it becomes costumer acquisition cost since it allow us to partner with thousands of organization worldwide that are helping us to build initial userbase (20 hosts minimum) to receive funding for their project.

Initial members putted 100.000 euro, we received also 60.000 euro from different grants. We are receiving 400.000 euro from a cooperative bank and 300.000 euro from cooperative mutual funding.
With this money we should be able to activate 100 destination and be in break even point in 15 months.

You are connected with thousands of initiative, our partnership could help to fund many of them and create a worldwide collaboration.

MIT and all the best initiatives that have applied.

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