behind the counter x Som & Small Som
The Yard Hostel, Thailand
The Yard Hostel is an eco-friendly hostel situated in the hipster neighbourhood of Ari in Bangkok, Thailand that aims to reduce human footprint and spread awareness of sustainable practices.
The Yard Hostel is the brainchild of Som and Small Som, who are also the founders of The Yard Grocery and true friends of the planet for whom living a green life comes as naturally as breathing! So this week behind the counter, join us in conversation with them as they tell us all about their journey with the Yard and give us some great insights on adopting sustainable practices in the hospitality industry.
How did you decide to start a hostel?
Both of us are nature and travel enthusiasts and we’re both like-minded who shared a common dream of building a centre for the community and spreading environmental awareness.
So we started The Yard hostel 6 years ago, back in 2014 with the aim of providing clean and comfortable budget accommodation that is designed and built sustainably for travellers who care about the environment or simply want a quiet place to relax in Bangkok.
How would you describe the Philosophy behind The Yard hostel?
Actually, the values of the company are represented by the company name.
In English language, the word ‘yard’ means an open space next to a house, however, in Thai language, the word ‘yard’ means family or relatives.
Therefore, we aim to provide a living space that has a warm and friendly feeling, just like you feel when you’re around family. We want to bring people together so they can share stories, make connections, and learn about sustainable ways of living.
We want to provide an example of how an accommodation can be built with a low impact on the environment. We believe that this will help improve the environmental awareness of local people and our guests.
Tell us more about the sustainable practices adopted by The Yard?
So when we designed the hostel we took our impact on the environment into serious consideration. For example, we used recycled materials to build the rooms, which are actually old shipping containers.
We insulated the rooms with recycled paper to reduce energy consumption from air conditioning and keeping them cool and protected from the outside heat. Also, a high-level roof can help to reduce heat from outside too. We avoid the usage of air conditioning in our lobby.
All the appliances that we use at the hostel are energy-saving appliances. For example, the air conditioning plus the insulation reduces 40% of energy consumption. We’ve installed motion sensor lights in front of our hostel because, at night, we only need the light if someone approaches the hostel and we designed the hostel in such a way to make the most of natural sunlight, so every room has a big window and ever bed has their own tiny window too next to it.
We also wanted to have a green space in the property so we’ve used literally half of our property space and converted it into a garden. By offering reusable bottles to guests to borrow during their time with us, we encourage them to practice sustainability and this way we can reduce our use of plastic by 1000 bottles a month!
Furthermore, we aim to reduce food waste, so we serve breakfast to our guests as a set so there is no food waste. Of course, they can always ask for a second breakfast set or more coffee/tea until full.
How does The Yard contribute to the local community?
The Yard Hostel started a campaign 3 years ago, called ‘Rest For Forest’ because when I went to Karen village and found out that the local community there prevent the wildfires for us.
Most of us Thai people, never know about rotation farming and they think that the people of Karen village destroy the forest. After I found out, I tried to as many people about that by starting the campaign.
The concept behind the campaign is — if someone books directly through our website; we donated 7% of the booking amount to the Rest For Forest project, we provide 7% discount to our guests and we also save 7%. This turns out to be a total of 21% which is the same as the commission that we have to pay booking agents.
The money donated to the project is used to buy pollution masks for local people which they really need because there is a very serious problem with air pollution in the north which is caused by agricultural burning and forest fires.
The money is also used to buy gasoline for the vehicles of the hill tribe members as they work to prevent fires by clearing dead trees and preparing rainwater tanks. The rest of the money is used to raise awareness about the causes of forest fires. So after 2 years of starting the project, we were able to donate a humble amount of 700$, which might not seem a lot but which we are very proud of, nonetheless.
What were the kind of challenges you faced during the pandemic and how did you cope?
During Covid-19 we adapted our business to be mobile by introducing ‘The Yard Grocery’. When Thailand went into lockdown, we tried to find a way to keep our team, we didn’t want to let any of them go, especially during these hard times.
At the same time, we got to know from our friends, who happen to be farmers that they had no income because all the hotels, restaurants and cafes were closed too. So naturally, we tried to fix this problem by starting another business — The Yard Grocery, a mobile grocery cart operating in the Ari neighbourhood of Bangkok, Thailand.
So we ride the electric truck around the neighbourhood and sell products like fruits, vegetables, sauce, vegan cheese which we source from small-scale Thai farms that are suffering losses due to the pandemic and sells them door-to-door around the Ari neighbourhood. We also sell returnable bottles of organic milk which people can bring back and refill and homemade yoghurt from our hostel, which we usually make fresh for breakfast whenever we have guests.
Every Sunday we organise a Sunday market, our neighbours come with things that are recyclable for us because their apartment don’t have separate trashes, so they bring it to the market and we separate it accordingly for the recycling factory. We have a space for BBQ and we use local beef and pork to raise awareness amongst people to reduce the carbon footprint from imported ingredients. We have also designed and created a co-working space in our hostel so when travellers and digital nomads come back, they would be happy to use this space.
Everything we do, we aim to do keeping in mind sustainability, people, planet and profit.
What according to you is most important to have an extraordinary guest experience?
We believe our greatest resource is our team.
A happy team will share their happiness with the guests. Our staff treats our guests like family members and I think the guests really appreciate this.
As a result, we get a lot of positive reviews online, which helps the hostel to grow in popularity.
Lastly, what is your personal and business mantra?
Our team, our guests, our neighbours and our planet are all our family and at The Yard Hostel and The Yard Grocery, we believe that “Family has no boundary”.
