By Alisha Somanas
After five years in Thailand a French pharmaceutical consultant is pushing ahead with his travel start-up, based on the realisation that many travellers want to feel like a local rather than a tourist when visiting a destination.
Maxime Besnier wants travellers to have authenic local experiences.
Maxime Besnier, CEO and founder of Very Local Trip, said he was inspired to enter the travel industry out of a desire to give his family and friends an unforgettable local experience in Bangkok.
“I didn’t always have as much time as I wanted to take them around personally, but I always wanted them to have an authentic local experience,” said Besnier who found out that local friends and local experiences are not yet readily available on the travel scene.
And so Very Local Trip was born, a platform that allows locals to post personalised tours of their own city priced at their discretion. The website screens trips, and takes a 20% commission.
Travellers seeking local experiences can browse available trips the same way they would browse for a book on Amazon or an Airbnb room.
“This one-on-one ‘like a friend’ approach is disrupting the traditional tourism industry with conventional tour operators and such. Travellers can connect more with a ‘local friend,’ and usually what happens is that they become good friends at the end of the day. This makes travelling much more unique, personal and genuine,” said Besnier.
A year after its launch Very Local Trip now seeks to go deeper, but Besnier discovered it was not quite as simple as similar sharing services like Airbnb.
“We are giving full services but it’s not as simple as travellers paying, showing up, staying, then leaving. We need an extensive review system and reliable, trustworthy, English-speaking local guides.”
Very Local Trip offers local urban experiences, community-based tourism, and getaway trips.
This led to his new push towards community-based tourism (CBTs). It is also due to Besnier discovering that many guide applicants are local organisations or individuals who have worked with local communities and have also built the groundwork needed to support travellers did not receive a single foreign visitor.
They needed a way to get the word out and, for them, Very Local Trip is the missing link. A further plus is they have the reliability that Besnier is seeking.
He welcomed them as partners because, in responding to the demand for local experiences, his aim is not to create more touristy spots but to create sustainable development. These communities often bring the added value of authentic experiences such as the age-old traditions of cloth-dyeing or sustainable agriculture.
Very Local Trip’s site now offers two different types of experiences – urban experiences with a local friend, and community-based tourism and getaway trips.
“I believe in the ‘traveller meeting local’ space, and so far no one has a model that works on a global scale”.
Besnier said start-ups are faster to respond to this growing trend in local travel experiences due to their adaptability, flexibility, and responsiveness. These qualities also give them an edge in meeting travellers’ changing needs, and mesh them to the needs of the destination communities.
