Meet Sanne Meijboom from I Like Local

We interview I Like Local – a social venture that aims to offer unique experiences for travelers and financial support for locals in Asia and Africa.

Sanne Meijboom, founder of I Like Local, is a passionate entrepreneur who believes that organizations need to make a shift from profit maximization to the right balance in profit making and social & environmental value creation. With two companies “I Like Local” and “Impact Nomads”, she is trying to contribute to this. Sanne is a member of Travel Massive Nairobi.

👉 I Like Local is one of the ten sustainable tourism startups that were awarded grants from the 2019 Booking.com Booster Program. Learn how to get your responsible tourism project funded.

What is I Like Local?

I Like Local is an impact travel market place that connects travelers with local people in developing countries in order to provide personal and authentic experiences to travelers and, likewise, an extra source of income for local hosts.

More and more travelers want to avoid feeling like a tourist and seek authentic local travel experiences that make an impact, yet they don’t know how to find them. At the same time, locals hardly benefit from tourism in their own countries.

 For every $100 spent on holiday by tourists from a developed country, only about $5 actually stays in the destination, according to the UN Environmental Program.

With our solution we help travelers to find and book authentic, local travel experiences in an easy and fast way. I Like Local provides local people with a source of income, prevents them from engaging in activities that are harmful to themselves or their environment, plus facilitates cultural understanding and exchange.

What is your take on immersive travel and its impact on local communities?

Immersive and local travel is gaining in popularity as is the traveler’s awareness of their own footprint. In recent years, the travel industry has been abuzz with conversation surrounding the rise of “experiential travel or immersive travel”.

When we started in 2014, we were one of the first players focusing on both immersive travel and making a positive impact at the same time. Although tourism has become one of the largest and fastest-growing economic sectors in the world and has the potential to bring enormous benefits to communities all over the world, thus far the positive impact of travel to the people on the ground has been limited as money stayed with large players ruling the industry.

Even with the rise of peer-to-peer market places that cut out these large players, the impact on local communities has been limited. In my belief, this trend of authentic and impactful travel will continue to grow. The biggest challenge is how to create an impact on a large scale for local communities without causing any harm.

How is I Like Local working on these issues?

Currently, we are working on ways to use the I Like Local platform to create an impact on a large scale in Asia, Africa and potentially Central and South America together with our partner ActionAid. Working to achieve social justice, gender equality and poverty eradication, ActionAid is currently active in 45 countries across the world.

The more local people we can onboard and the more travelers we can reach and convince to book, the higher the economic impact.

Via the connection that we make between a traveler and a host, we also have a social impact that facilitates knowledge, mutual understanding and cultural exchange.

What are your next steps?

We have recently been selected by the Booking.com Booster Program, The World Tourism Forum in Lucerne, and the Global Entrepreneurship Summit 2019 in the Hague all at the same time.

As part of the Booking Booster, we just spent three weeks in Amsterdam, working with mentors and experts from Booking.com to bring I Like Local to the next level and decide on the best strategy to realize all of the above.

The Booking.com Booster Program was a ride of a lifetime with amazing experts, insights, and connections for a lifetime.

Going home with a grant of 100.000 EUR was the cherry on the cake.

What other tourism companies or projects inspire you?

What inspires and motivates me are all the companies that see the need of change in how we are currently operating and living, and take action. It is so great to see how many fantastic initiatives are taking place across various industries. This really motivates me to bundle our competencies to create solutions on a large scale.

See a preview of how I Like Local works: 

Follow Sanne on Travel Massive and learn more about I Like Local on Facebook.