Visit.org Creates Opportunities For Travellers and Communities

Michal Alter, CEO and co-founder of Visit.org, increases public knowledge and engagement with society’s needs by creating mutually-beneficial opportunities.

Every tour offered by Visit.org explores the rich history and surroundings while respecting local culture. Travel Massive is all about empowering change in travel and we’ve asked Michal, who is part of our Travel Massive NYC chapter, to answer a few questions about their Visit.org initiatives to help inspire the responsible traveller in you!

What is your goal?

Our goal is to enhance the mission of great social organizations and increase public knowledge of and engagement with society’s needs by facilitating mutually beneficial, in-person encounters between people and communities around the world.

Who is your startup for?

Our startup is for any type of traveler. What makes our immersive, impactful travel product unique is that we focus on short and affordable experiences, so any type of traveler who is tired of mainstream tourism attractions and wants to know and understand their destinations through first-hand, real-life experiences can add them to their itinerary. This includes resort vacationers, people who visit destinations for the first time and want to see the main attractions but also experience real local culture, and even business travelers. We are the first enterprise to have local organizations open their doors to millions of travelers from around the world and offer the booking experience for these activities as easy as booking a hotel room.

What inspired you to create this startup?

In the summer of 2008, I was working with a nonprofit in Tel Aviv that helps refugees from Darfur, South Sudan and Eritrea with food, shelter, and long-term sustainable programs. When I gave birth to my first child, both of my worlds came together. My refugee friends and my other friends from around Tel Aviv came to congratulate me, bearing baby gifts. Both of these groups of people had been living five minutes away from each other, but had never had an encounter. This was a powerful experience for everyone involved, and it wouldn’t have happened if my day job didn’t involve working with members of the refugee community.

After this experience, I wanted to give more people from different cultures a chance to have a similarly genuine and relaxed human interaction. That is what inspired me to create Visit.org.

What is your startup about?

Our startup brings together impactful organizations and travelers in a unique way. We give more visibility to our partner nonprofits from all over the world by exhibiting their in-person visit opportunities. Travelers can book the experiences on our online platform and the tour revenue is channeled back to the nonprofit they are going to visit. In this manner, the traveler benefits the community they are visiting without having to deal with the pitfalls that normally accompany voluntourism.

Tours are diverse, ranging from surfing lessons in South Africa with our partner nonprofit Surfing With Kids which empowers local youth through surfing, to exploring the caves and hiking the mountains of Sierra Gorda in Mexico to participating in a cooking workshop with Gastromotiva in Brazil. We centralize hundreds of impactful, immersive experiences hosted by sustainable nonprofits onto one platform.

How can someone help or get involved?

We have an ambassador program, for which we are constantly looking for avid travelers with a passion for sustainability. We are searching for storytelling ambassadors with a penchant for writing, photography ambassadors and travel ambassadors who can pilot visits and provide the local host organizations with constructive feedback on how to improve their offerings to travelers. Other ways to get involved is through Visit.org’s affiliate program for bloggers that allows them to feature a Visit.org widget on their site. A percentage of the tour revenue will go to the blogger for any tour booked on Visit.org through the widget on their website/blog.

What has been your biggest accomplishment? How many people has your initiative helped?

We have generated $50,000 in new earned revenue to our partner organizations around the world, now 229 partners in 36 different countries. Five years from now we plan to serve 10,000 partner organizations, channeling millions of dollars to the hands of local communities around the globe.

Purposeful Traveler is a series that profiles inspiring people or projects making a purposeful change to the way we travel. You can connect with Michal Alter on Travel Massive. If you know of a Purposeful Traveler who should be featured, email us.