Opinions about Kookooning – Theme Traveller
To break the routine, escape a weekend, to celebrate a birthday, go on honeymoon, learn to make wine or bread, to offer a stay in love and surprise its half, to find unusual stays to the sea, mountain or green can be revitalizing. The offer of stays and the number of service providers are abundant, between the living room and the unusual stays with theme. To combine accommodation and original activities according to your personal desires, Kookooning is a French start-up (Drôme) launched in 2016, and surged on the wave of “do it yourself” and sustainable tourism by offering users to combine travel, varied activities and accommodation. So can one sleep in a chalet with snow, skiing, sleeping in a vineyard and doing a wine-making internship, learning the art of the shared vegetable garden, taking a course of local cuisine, hiking and a paragliding internship, a riding bike, sleeping in a yurt, etc...
Kookooning is a blend of Wwoofing, Airbnb and Wonderbox, allowing you to experience a unique tourist experience while contacting guests directly.
What is Kookooning? What is the principle and above all, what should we know before booking? Here’s our overview of the young start-up who wants to be a leader in sustainable tourism in France.
What is KooKooning?
Kookooning’s adventure began in January 2016, when Sébastien Guardiola founded the platform based on the know-how of his digital agency KAPT. Faced with the American giant Airbnb which offers urban stays, Kookooning shows the desire to get out of mass tourism by offering rural stays to holidaymakers wishing to discover another France than that of the cities, the Louvre or the Eiffel Tower. The website, fluid and very clean, is a linking platform between owners and holidaymakers, referring to the best offers of authentic stays.
“Our desire is to promote local know-how, and craftsmanship through tourism and the help of KooKooning [...] In short, a person who wishes to make paragliding in the Alps can find accommodation nearby, with in bonus a person passionate about this activity.”
KooKooning therefore invites himself in the landscape of tourism and travel, as a solution combining housing in the home and sustainable tourism and solidarity, while playing only the role of intermediary of exchanges. With this innovative idea, KooKooning was elected tourism innovation in the category "in orbit" of France Tourisme Lab. After a phase of incubation by the Nîmes Open Tourism Lab, and after two years of activity, the company registered more than 20,000 active users, more than 5,000 accommodations and 550 activities were offered on the platform. In 2019, Kookooning accelerates its development outside Metropolitan France: in Guadeloupe, Morocco and Crete.
Kookooning, how does it work?
The operating mode is simple: on the website or on the application, we start with select your wishes among many themes (“All desires” if we are out of ideas):
– Sports activities - Nature - Family – Terroir and gourmets – Creative leisure and crafts – Heritage and culture - Business and seminars – Detent and well-being - Unusual - Romantic stay.
We then select the desired region or city – nearby or everywhere in France if in lack of inspiration - by selecting what you are looking for, leisure activities and/or thematic accommodations. It is then necessary to provide the desired dates of stay, as well as the number of passengers (up to 15 people).
The KooKooning platform will then display all hosts or service providers available on the dates indicated, as on the Airbnb site, with the list of accommodations and activities on the left of the screen, and geographical location on an interactive map on the right. We can sort results by relevance, geographical distance and price. Research can even be refined according to its budget per day and/or per night.
Once the activity or accommodation is chosen, take the time to consult the photos, read the description of the activities, the conditions and the history/biography of your host.
Only to be left create an account to make a booking request by writing a small message to meet with the host. You can also write to him before you book for more information.
Good to know. : Note that it is also possible to contact certain ads that show a phone number or link to a website ( PREMIUM ads).
Benefits and disadvantages of Kookooning
Benefits
- Free access,
- A wide range of leisure and accommodation,
- Great diversity of themes (crafts, creative leisure, heritage, culture, etc.),
- Absence of intermediary,
- A vast "Ideas box" of stays,
- Holidays for all types of people (couple, friends, family),
- Navigation of the pleasant site,
- No service fees.
Disadvantages
- Very variable price,
- No user reviews.
Kookooning: the opinion of the editor
Kookooning lacks user reviews but let him benefit from the youth: with his resolutely innovative offer, Kookooning presents a solution worthy of being widely known to the general public. It is no longer a matter of paying for accommodation or for a type of activity but of doing both, while being in contact with the premises.
At the crossroads of Airbnb and Wwoof France, Kookooning allows in a few clicks to get out of mass tourism and travel otherwise, in its own country and soon abroad. What if, at the visit of a vineyard or a organic farm, the idea in you to make a professional conversion in organic farming?
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