What is Eat Plants & Travel? An introduction to our platform as we prepare for launch
Written by Parma S, founder
This month we started the exciting process of launching Eat Plants & Travel, taking our platform to market for businesses and the world’s vegan community to join and start using.
What is EPT? To put it simply:
We’re a marketplace built from the ground up to make it easier to discover and book experiences directly with 100% vegan businesses.
Designed to be an alternative to mainstream booking and listing sites like Airbnb, Booking.com, and OpenTable, EPT is a space where customers can find and book stays, restaurants, cooking classes, travel tours, and more - directly with vegan businesses who share their values, supporting the community to grow and become stronger.
The ‘Green Economy’ and keeping it in the family
Veganism is a core component of the ‘Green Economy’, a broad moniker that defines how money is circulated amongst businesses and industries that exist to improve human well-being, the environment, and animal welfare.
As a minority consumer group who cares about the services we use, the products we buy and where our money is spent, our ability to make informed choices is largely determined by what’s available to us. Unfortunately, that often means buying ethically sourced goods from places we'd rather not like Amazon, chain supermarkets and mainstream booking sites.
Of course, we don’t always have to, but large corporations provide convenience and are often the only places we’re able to find the vegan businesses and services we’re looking for - this is precisely what EPT fixes.
Eat Plants & Travel is designed to remove the friction between being ethical consumers and spending money in a world that still hasn’t caught on to the notion of being cruelty-free. We’re not interested in ‘vegan-friendly’ or ‘vegan options’ here - every business we list on EPT is verified by our team and is entirely 100% vegan and plant-based.
Good people building good businesses.
Supporting independant vegan businesses to grow
It'll come as no surprise that the majority of vegan businesses are small and independently run. To support them we often have to go through large corporations with poor ethical track records.
At EPT, we're changing this by creating a single one-stop space for the world's vegan community where every vegan business can be discovered and showcase their services to the very customers they were created for.
These are just some of the ways we help vegan businesses grow:
Direct Bookings & Zero Commissions: We route visitors straight to our business partners’ own reservation systems, websites, or digital menus, allowing them to bypass costly third-party commission fees completely
SEO and GEO optimised: Businesses receive a dedicated page engineered for maximum digital discovery. Our search specialists ensure listings rank highly across native search engines and AI technologies.
An intuitive search experience: Our custom search interface is built specifically to help our vegan visitors find the exact businesses they are looking for. Visitors can effortlessly filter by location, category, and specific amenities.
Dynamic Profiles & Rich Galleries: Businesses can showcase their products and services with comprehensive image galleries and product feature placements. We also seamlessly embed live Instagram or TikTok feeds directly into business profiles.
Special Offers & Promotions: Drive footfall and run community deals using dedicated promotional blocks. Partners can instantly update seasonal offers and track return on investment.
Premium Marketing Amplification: Maximise global reach with prominent ad-free homepage placements, exclusive highlights across our official social channels, and direct features in our newsletter.
You can read more about our features on our dedicated business page.
How much does it cost to join EPT?
Our business model is deliberately simple and completely transparent. We make our money through on-site advertisements and tiered plans designed for businesses of all sizes.
Free Seed Plan: This allows businesses to be listed on EPT for free, and is a perfect gateway for small independent outfits looking to increase their visibility. It covers all the essential features such as headline images, direct bookings, web and menu links, a business profile, and community reviews.
Our premium plans start at just £5 a month and include:
Grow - (£5/month or £48/annual) Designed to elevate businesses, this tier includes embedded social media posts, marketing boosts via our social media channels, a 20-image gallery, and the ability to promote special offers and discounts.
Bloom - (£9/month or £86.40/annual) Our top plan includes everything in Grow, plus a full gallery of up to 40 images, the ability to add up to 4 additional experiences to our directory, 4 featured social media posts, extensive marketing boosts by our team, and full account management including quarterly performance reports.
Our plans are priced to be affordable, accessible for all vegan businesses anywhere in the world, with 20% savings available for businesses who want to pay annually. We are able to price our plans low because of our small overheads. Our team might be hard-working and super dedicated, but we’re a tiny outfit with a few specialist volunteers helping us, and our platform only works if we are as inclusive as possible.
When we say we want every fully vegan business in the world to list on EPT, we mean it - That includes everyone from world-renowned plant-based restaurants like Plates in Farringdon, to the lovely lady we met travelling in Vietnam selling delicious plant-based banh mi from a tiny kitchen stove on wheels in the alleyway behind a bank in Da Lat.
Parma & Simona, founders (Vietnam, thinking deeply about hot to make Eat Plants & Travel work)
The team behind the platform
Did I mention we’re a tiny outfit? My wife Simona and I have been vegan for about eight years now. We came up with the idea for EPT whilst travelling in Asia, discovering and talking with hundreds of inspirational, incredible vegan businesses along the way.
Many of them spoke to us about the difficulty they faced getting noticed outside of Google Maps searches and limited Instagram posts.
When we returned home, we heard the same from business owners in London (complete with added business rates, council, and commercial tax headaches). We wanted to do something to join the dots, bring all those brilliant businesses together and help them find new customers and experience on-going success so that our community can grow and have greater choices. (Read more about us)
My professional background is in project management and business marketing for the private sector, local government and charities. Simona’s experience covers business administration management from various sectors including construction, hospitality, digital marketing and for a short time, a bespoke shoe-makers in London’s Marylebone.
Between us, we run the day-to-day operation of Eat Plants & Travel. We are supported with the more technical aspects by our SEO expert, Monika, who's been propelling digital visibility for businesses around the world for the past 10 years. We also have Ramsey, our very own IT expert who makes sure our complex search indexing and site functionality are working as intended.
Alongside a scattering of volunteers who help out with other technical things that are beyond my ability to explain, we delighted to have taken Eat Plants & Travel to a stage where we can tie a ribbon around it and present it to the vegan community we are immensely proud to be part of.
What’s next and how to get involved
This week sees our soft launch begin, where we start getting the word out and promoting EPT on social media and sector-based information sites. We are confident everything is working as it should, but as we look ahead to our official launch in December, we need a few more weeks of live testing to iron out any minor issues we haven't noticed yet.
I want to take this moment to thank our very early business partners who joined us during our early adopters programme months ago. Their feedback was invaluable in getting us to where we are today, and I’m looking forward to supporting them over the coming months.
Thank you to our early adopters:
To join EPT and get your business listed, you have a number of options.
Before I wrap up this slightly longer than intended introduction to EPT, I wanted to mention our newest section to the platform called “Vegan Voices”. Vegan Voices is for all those amazing content creators who enhance the community such as bloggers and writers that review vegan restaurants, share travel guides, create recipes and write vegan interest articles. If you’d like to share a blog or article, you can do so here: https://www.eatplantsandtravel.com/vegan-voices/join
Thank you for reading and I hope this introduction gives you a gist of what our little ambitious platform is, what we’re trying to achieve, and how we came to be.
Lastly - I realise I wrote quite a lot about businesses above (which is necessary at this point as we really want vegan businesses to take notice) but I also wanted to write to our wonderful community:
EPT is made for you to discover, explore, and find vegan businesses around the world without the questions, doubts, and constant checking. We’ve just started, so our listings aren’t quite in the thousands yet. However, please bookmark the site, save it to your mobile home screens, and check in regularly. I promise you that as our listings grow, Eat Plants & Travel will be the first site you open before anything else!
Parma Sira Founder, Eat Plants & Travel
