Asia

Sharing Economy in Southeast Asia: lots of tours and activities

Two years ago I wrote about sharing economy services in Southeast Asia and I see that post is a bit out of date. As I prepare for a trip to Thailand it’s a good time to update that post. There are a ton of options for peer to peer tours and activities in Southeast Asia. Other peer to peer services are more sparse in the region. 

You can find all the peer to peer travel services I know about in my spreadsheet. This sheet includes a column for sorting or filtering by location. Be sure not to filter out the “Global” businesses as they are likely to have services in whatever country you’re visiting. Below I just highlight the companies that explicitly focus on Southeast Asia. But there are plenty of other good options that also operate in other parts of the world.

Activities

I Like Local focuses on peer to peer tours and activities in Asia and Africa, with a heavy presence in SE Asia.

Withlocals has some good tours and activities in the region

BeMyGuest focuses on Asia in general. They seem to be based in Singapore and have lots of options throughout SE Asia.

BackstreetAcademy is exclusively in Southeast Asia

LocalAlike offers tours in Thailand

TakeMeTour is another Thai based peer to peer tour platform.

Boatbay is an Australian based peer to peer boat rental company with a growing fleet of options in Asia

PlateCulture offers peer to peer home cooking with a solid presence in Southeast Asia.

TravelingSpoon connects travelers with locals who offer food experiences in their home. This company started in Asia and has a lot of good options in the region.

Kravve is a Malaysian platform for peer to peer food delivered. Not focused on travelers but I could see a use if you want something yummy brought to your lodging by a local.

Dinez-in is another Malaysian business connecting people with home chefs for home cooked meals and cooking classes.

Crowdsourced Delivery

I’ve found a some demand in Southeast Asia for crowdsourced delivery. I wrote about a request I got on PiggyBee for my upcoming trip to Bangkok.

Bistip is the only social shipping company I’m aware of that focuses on deliveries to Southeast Asia.

AirFrov started their crowdsourced delivery business in Singapore. It looks like most request on the site are still for items from around the world to be delivered to Singapore.

Transportation

Peer to peer taxis are available through Uber in most big cities in Southeast Asia now, along with competitors like Grab. I distinguish these taxi services from true ridesharing where people only take passengers along on trips they are already planning to drive. And ridesharing passengers generally pay no more than their share of the cost of the trip.

Ryde is a platform for ridesharing that was available in Hong Kong and Singapore last I checked. (The site is currently timing out so I’m not sure if it’s a bug or they went out of business.)

Wunder offers ridesharing (focused on the drive to work) in Manila.

I’m sure there are other ridesharing services in cities in Southeast Asia that I don’t know about. This is the type of service that has no need to announce itself globally if they want to focus on a small region.

Home Exchanges

It’s difficult to find home exchanges in Asia. But it’s not impossible. For my upcoming visit to Bangkok I found a lot of options on LoveHomeSwap and pretty quickly secured a nice condo in the city for a points swap. If you plan to travel to Asia and want to find home exchanges, be sure to first test out potential house swap networks for that region.  Last year HomeExchange.com partnered with TripVillas to address their deficit in Asia. Hopefully we are just seeing the beginnings of growing interest in house swapping in Asia.