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Yūgen Earthside
Sustainable travel booking platform for unique destinations
Top 50 Startup
2022
Created by
Hilary Matson
Yūgen Earthside is a sustainable travel booking platform. We find and screen responsible tour operators who offer package trips, usually in unique destinations, and add their tours to our site. The goal is to make it easier for customers to discover and book a sustainable trip. We offer small-group trips that are both guided and self-guided. Our tours mostly focus on experiences in nature, cultural activities, and local interaction.
Posted in
Tour
,
Responsible Travel
,
Sustainability
Hi everyone! My name is Hilary, I'm an American (native Seattlite) living in Paris, France.
After working for a multinational corporation for nearly a decade, I finally took the plunge into creating a new path for myself. I left to pursue my MBA at HEC Paris where I studied entrepreneurship, social and inclusive business, and developed my business plan for Yugen Earthside.
Building Yugen Earthside is truly my dream job. I started working on it full time upon earning my MBA (June 2020), launched the website in December 2020, and incorporated as a Social Purpose Corporation in 2021. Although we're quite new, we already have 30 fantastic partners and more than 600 responsible itineraries around the world!
Spending 100% of my "work hours" (and then some - let's be honest, entrepreneur life is 24/7) focused on a mission that supports both my values and interests is extremely rewarding. My personal mission is to spend my career contributing something to the Earth that will leave it better than I found it, and this fulfills that earnest desire.
While Yugen Earthside is primarily a sustainable travel booking platform, we also focus on advocacy and awareness. Holistic sustainable travel means having access to resources, thinking about your trip's climate impact, and packing as light and zero-waste as possible. Our Sustainability Resources section and our Earthsiders Eco-Shop help with these objectives.
My dream for Yugen Earthside is for it to be the go-to hub for travelers looking to learn about, prepare for, and book sustainable trips.
We screen our partner tour operators, and customers trust us to find the most sustainable operators in a given destination. Transparency for us is huge. On each trip listing, we'll tell you exactly WHY a trip is sustainable. We won't use complicated jargon, and we don't rely on certifications you may have never heard of. We explain in laymen's terms why our trips are good for the environment, societies, and economies.
Please upvote us, and more importantly: please contact me directly if I can help you with a sustainable trip in 2022!