Frequently Asked Questions

GoHabitat is the booking platform that directly funds local nature restoration. You’ll find food forests, regenerative farms, permaculture projects, rewilding initiatives, agroforestry systems and all types of other places where soil, water, and biodiversity come first, and where guests are genuinely welcomed.These Habitats invite you to stay, sleep, eat, walk, and participate while restoration and cultivation of the living landscape continues around you. With every booking, part of the stay is reinvested into the land and the local people who nurture the places you visit. This way we collectively empower the development of an endless patchwork of grassroots communities all across Europe.The platform too reinvests all profits into nature restoration infrastructure. We're setting up a foundation that will fully own the social enterprise following a steward ownership model, described in more detail below.

Because it is a little act that can go a long way.There is nothing quite like sleeping in a forest that grows richer because of your stay. All over Europe, people are rebuilding our ecosystems. often quietly, often underfunded, because restoration doesn’t fit the industrial rules of “profitability.” By welcoming you, these places can keep planting, protecting, and feeding their communities without bending their mission to fit a broken system while enabling them to build the new ones instead. Served as meals, laughter and community, this is how collectively we can dissolve dominant patterns: thousands of small bookings become a movement blending leisure, action, reciprocity, meaning, awareness, learning, and belonging to become a lifeline for Nature’s recovery.

Habitats can be anything, a tent pitch, camper spot, cabin, tiny house, farm stay, off-grid retreat, or even a carefully run luxury eco-resort, all built with intent, character, and love. No two Habitats are the same. You’re stepping into a living project, meeting hosts where they are in their restoration trajectory. That can mean simpler infrastructure or refined comfort, shared facilities or full privacy, seasonal rhythms or year-round stays. What they share is unpolished natural beauty, built in rhythm with the circle of life, and a stay that gently reminds you there are other ways to live, build, and belong than the default.

No. You can simply come to unplug and slow down in places of unpolished natural beauty, knowing that your stay alone already matters. Participation is always optional.That said, what often happens: people arrive to switch off, then connect to the land and end up wanting to help a little. If that’s you, it’s usually warmly welcomed, but never expected. Depending on the Habitat, there might be light and joyful involvement: planting something small, harvesting, or helping in the kitchen before you share a meal. The opposite holds true too! We embrace reciprocity, and Habitats are known to be places of curiosity. If you bring a skill to share, you’ll likely find people willing to learn.

We borrowed the “Project Bar” from crowdfunding to show clearly and transparently what goals a place is working towards. It makes your contribution uniquely tangible: you can see exactly what you’re supporting, and how visitor income collectively helps these landscapes move forward. Fair warning: it’s a darn good icebreaker too. What starts with a question about the project will easily end with you going home understanding the landscape, the local people, and the real challenges and opportunities of making restoration work.

By intention, yes: visitor income is meant to directly strengthen the local initiatives. Where the Project Bar is enabled, you’ll see exactly what that support is connected to. That said, the Project Bar is encouraged, but optional. Hosts can choose to turn it on, and they can also choose to allocate a percentage of each booking rather than the full amount. We’re not here to enforce a power dynamic, we meet hosts where they are. Sometimes that means prioritising basic stability first, and we want to give them the space to do that.

From what you pay, 85% goes to the Habitat (the host/place you’re staying with), and 15% goes to GoHabitat to keep the service running support, development, growth, payments infrastructure, and the work of bringing guests and Habitats together.

Yes. This is one of the first features we’re building next. Since we’re just getting started, we’ll roll it out in steps. In the near term, you’ll likely receive an email when a Habitat you visited completed their Project Bar goal. Beyond that, we’re working on ways to share progress more regularly, possibly including a simple “portfolio” in your profile that shows the places you’ve stayed and how they’ve moved forward.

Given the diversity of landscapes and their challenges, there isn’t one universal metric that covers impact measurement for all Habitats.  We reduce risk of greenwashing through curation, evidence, and accountability. In other words, only select places that walk the talk. Therefore, you won’t find an intensive dairy farm with half a hectare of food forest on our platform. We curate who gets listed. Habitats are selected because land stewardship is at the foundation of what they do (soil, water, biodiversity), not a side project. We screen for credibility. We look for proof in practice: what the site is restoring, how it’s managed, and whether the story matches reality. In many cases we also validate through references, documentation, and (where possible) visits. We make goals visible. Where enabled, the Project Bar shows what a place is working on and links visitor income to concrete steps, making it harder to hide behind vague promises. We trust the crowd for validation. As a visitor, your review helps confirm the integrity of a place in practice, not just on paper. We’re always learning, and your feedback matters if our curation ever slips one through. We keep the right to remove listings. If a Habitat misrepresents itself, shifts into extractive practices, or breaks trust, we won’t keep them on the site. Our approach is not to enforce an efficiency and outcome-based standard from above. Rather we “back the right people” with integrity and local knowledge and trust them to organise for abundance in the ecosystems they steward. A final note on travel: tourism remains a delicate topic, as it should be. GoHabitat is limited to Europe, and we encourage guests to travel thoughtfully (and avoid flying when possible). However, we won’t police you. What we do believe is that people will keep seeking nature to rest and recharge and we’d rather have that demand strengthen the many living landscapes than quietly extracting from them.

Bioregions are the bigger picture. It’s already an achievement to help many individual Habitats move forward. But if we’re completely honest, one beautiful sanctuary on its own is not going to shift the wider system it sits within. A bioregion is the scale where regenerative interventions start to stick. At this regional level, natural areas are shaped by connected waters, soils, climates, and ecosystems. Working together at that scale, aligning water retention, biodiversity corridors, seed systems, shared knowledge, and local livelihoods, we can steward the conditions to restore ecological functioning most effectively. That’s why our foundation is committed to bioregional development. The idea is gaining momentum, and there are already “living regions” where this is being practised. But there’s a catch we see everywhere: landscapes busy keeping the lights on will not have the spare capacity to carry a wider regional role, no matter how inspiring this vision is. Therefore GoHabitat works in two layers: The booking side helps build the basics first: the income, resilience, and capacity to regain ambition. The foundation is there to support what comes next: investment in shared infrastructure, grassroots experimentation, and “lighthouse” locations that can pull the wider patchwork together.

GoHabitat is built as a reinvented NGO. While the platform operates as a social enterprise, a foundation holds 100% of the company’s shares. After operational costs are covered, all surplus flows into the foundation. And as the foundation is legally prohibited from distributing profit, these funds are fully reinvested into bioregional development, as described in Bioregions above, guided by three statutory principles: Grassroots experimentation Regional infrastructure Flagship locations This design structurally prevents the possibility for investors to prioritise short-term gain and extractive value capture over long-term ecological and societal value across generations.