Efyia, creating a unique community of travellers
If you've followed our series you know this is our last article for this one. You can review all of them here. We talked about why we've created Efyia and about our mission. Now let's talk about the how.
From our experience and our understanding talking to other travellers, we know planning a trip can be complicated and we want to put the human back into the process of planning, because who else can understand us with all the non rational side of emotions.
Some travellers love planning all their trips and other absolutely don't. And some of us, sometimes do and sometimes don’t, because we don’t have time, we want to go to a country where we don’t speak the language, we are going to a country that does not have a huge touristic infrastructure and we prefer advices and recommandations from people who know the place, we want to try a different kind of trip that we are not familiar with so we prefer to ask an expert…. That's why Efyia will give you a platform to exchange with all the travellers.
At Efyia, everyone is first a traveller, because obviously it is our common interest. Then, if you enjoy planning trips, you can offer your planning services to other travellers and become an Efyia expert. We are not asking experts to be travel agents! We want travellers to help each other using their own experiences. So each expert can choose the type of trips they can plan, the countries they know, etc… We want a personalised service human to human.
Expert should plan trips based on their experiences and we are only talking about planning a trip. We don't do bookings because we think that:
- first it is not our place, if you want the planning and the booking experience, then it is best to see a travel agent,
- second, because it is an important element of transparency for us. We believe that experts should recommend experiences based on what they felt and not on whether or not they are getting a commission. So their only client is you and the goal is that you are 100% satisfied.
- last, because we feel that in today's societies, booking is not that difficult and having control over your bookings gives you a more flexible experience. You know each price with full transparency and you don't need to contact us if you want to make changes or cancel something. Experts will give you a plan and all the links and info necessary to book and you have full flexibility to adjust it even more to yourself.
But Efyia is more than that. We are first a community of worldwide travellers so that means that we want people to exchange and share their experience in full honesty and without judgement. Share your pictures with us, but also tell us all the good and the bad you felt during your trip. We want the kind of conversations you have with friends when you come back and they ask for your opinion about the place. We welcome pictures, notes, videos, questions….Whatever you like as long your open to share it with the community. At Efyia, we accept that our world is biased and we think that the best way to make it better is to learn to discuss everything.
And we want to do all of that with certain values that are really important to us:
1 — Transparency. No it is not just a nice word to say! We strongly believe that transparency should be everywhere at Efyia. We want an honest and open-minded community so we want trust. And that comes with transparent relationships. That's for example why we are taking the time to explain everything about our creation and welcoming every of your comments. That's why we will share every step of our adventure with you and even more. We want you to be a part of our adventure and our community and we want every Efyia traveller and expert to exchange with transparency in mind.
2 — Respect. We are community driven and that comes with respect. We respect each other, we respect our opinions, we respect to disagree and most important, we respect other cultures. As we often said, our world is biased and everyone has a different view, experience, opinion... For us, it is important to be able to speak about it and learn to discuss it. It is for example, the possibility for me to tell you everything about my last trip, but to also be able to tell you that I am a dark-skinned women travelling alone and quite sensitive to colour prejudices and that is part of my experience but that I will respect that yours might be different.
3 — Diversity. We know it is a magic word but we don't think we can reflect the beauty of our world if we don't welcome everyone from everywhere. We truly believe that diversity is a huge asset and we want it to be part of Efyia DNA. What is travel, if we don't value diversity! Our platform is built on you being able to find travellers that you can relate to and you might be everything you like, you might change and value certain aspects of yourself differently along the way so the only way to be there for you is to be as diverse as possible!
So now you can probably better understand why our motto is "Travel the way you are!"
Finally, we are a work in progress, we don't assume that we have the perfect solution, but we know there is a problem and we want to solve it with you. That's why we will always welcome every comment and suggestion you want to share with the Efyia team directly.
If you think you might be an Efyia traveller, please sign up at www.efyia.com
