fairUP: A Three-Sided Marketplace for Ethical Travel Experiences

Design Consultant · Product Strategy & UX
2022 – 2023 · Emilia-Romagna, Italy (Remote)

Overview

fairUP is a marketplace for ethical travel experiences — tours, workshops, and cultural exchanges — built as a spin-off from Fairbnb’s cooperative accommodation platform.

Rather than relying on reviews or post-hoc moderation, fairUP introduced a third role into the marketplace: scouts. Local community members who proactively discover, vet, and vouch for experiences before they’re listed.

I led product design from concept to launch, defining the system, flows, and interfaces that made ethics operational — not aspirational. The platform was accepted into the MIT DesignX Incubator, validating both the product model and its scalability.

The Core Problem

Experiences don’t behave like accommodation. A stay is predictable: location, price, amenities. An experience is subjective: quality, authenticity, community impact.

Most platforms handle this reactively through reviews, which means early users absorb the risk. For a product positioning itself around ethics and trust, that wasn’t enough.

Adding experiences directly into Fairbnb’s existing platform would have forced incompatible workflows, unclear standards, and diluted accountability. The decision was made to build fairUP as a standalone system, optimized for experimentation and clarity, with future integration in mind.

Other experiences

A Three-Sided Marketplace

fairUP was designed around three interconnected roles:

Scouts discover and vet experiences using ethical and cultural criteria
Hosts provide experiences and articulate their community impact
Guests browse and book with confidence that listings are meaningfully verified

The challenge wasn’t UI complexity — it was coordination. Each role needed a clear, focused experience without being exposed to the full operational machinery behind the scenes.

The fairUP system

Designing the System

I started by mapping how information and responsibility flowed between roles.

Scouts evaluate and recommend. Hosts onboard and explain the context. Guests explore and decide.

Existing evaluation frameworks from Locals from Zero were adapted into structured product workflows, ensuring the platform reflected real community practices rather than invented standards.

The result was a system where ethics weren’t enforced by policy pages, but embedded directly into how listings were created, reviewed, and presented.

Search experience and filtering

Making Ethics Operational (Scout Experience)

For scouts, vetting couldn’t feel like box-ticking.

The evaluation flow was designed as a guided narrative:

What makes this experience distinctive?
Who benefits economically?
How does it connect to local culture or environment?

Qualitative storytelling sat alongside structured criteria, producing inputs that were meaningful for hosts and legible to guests. Scouts became credible intermediaries — not anonymous moderators.

Become a scout, admin showing scouts / scout profile

Collaboration Over Gatekeeping (Host Onboarding)

Host onboarding emphasized transparency over compliance.

Instead of asking hosts to “meet requirements,” the interface explained why information was requested and how it would appear publicly. This reframed vetting as collaboration, reduced friction, and improved the quality of submissions.

Hosts could clearly see how their input contributed to trust, not just approval.

Become a host, admin showing hosts / host profile

Trust at the Moment of Choice (Guest Experience)

For guests, ethical signals needed to support decisions without overwhelming them.

Discovery and listing screens surfaced:

Scout endorsements and bios
Impact indicators (community benefit, sustainability)
Narrative context grounded in real evaluation

Ethics were visible where decisions happened — not buried in disclaimers or FAQs. Transparency became part of the browsing experience, not an extra step.

Admin showing guests / guest profile

Brand Within the Fairbnb Ecosystem

fairUP needed its own identity — aligned with Fairbnb’s cooperative values, but less transactional in tone.

The visual system emphasized exploration and discovery over efficiency. Shared foundations created continuity, while subtle shifts in typography, layout, and imagery signaled a distinct product built for experiences rather than stays.

fairUP logo / identity

fairUP landing page

Validation & Outcomes

fairUP launched with active scouts, hosts, and guest bookings, demonstrating that the three-sided model was operationally viable.

The product was accepted into the MIT DesignX Incubator, securing early funding and institutional validation. As adoption grew, conversations shifted toward integrating fairUP back into the Fairbnb ecosystem — leveraging shared infrastructure while preserving the ethical systems established during this phase.

fairUP x MIT Design X

What This Work Proved

Ethical marketplaces don’t scale through claims; they scale through designed systems.

By making vetting visible, responsibility shared, and trust legible, fairUP showed that ethical travel experiences could be productized without losing credibility. The architecture, flows, and design principles from this work continue to inform how Fairbnb approaches expansion beyond accommodation.