Yugen Earthside is a sustainable travel booking platform and agency.
Our mission is to "Make Sustainable Travel Easy." Carbon removal contributions are automatically included with each booking, and we give all travelers the option to carbon offset their trip.
We partner with locally-owned, sustainable tour operators (DMCs) and list their trips on our platform. Currently, we're proud to have 10 partners around the world with more being onboarded all the time.
🌎 Destinations as of August 2023 include: Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands, India, Kenya, Nepal, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Tanzania, & Türkiye. COMING SOON: France, Bhutan, Papua New Guinea, Chile, Vietnam, South Africa, and the Maldives!
Our local partners expertly curate multi-day itineraries with care for the environment and communities in mind. Trip styles can either be self-guided, privately-guided, or small group fixed departures.
A special shoutout is given for women-owned partners, vegetarian-friendly trips, and locally-owned companies.
Our main trip themes include: Active (climbing, trekking, walking, yoga, scuba diving), Culture, Wildlife & Safaris, Wine, & Gastronomy. Please come visit us, and let us help YOU travel more sustainably!
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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!