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Posts from the ‘What Others are Saying’ category

London Food Guides on Travel with Kate

By on October 12, 2025

Let’s celebrate Friday with a virtual vacation. Kate has been exploring the food scene in London with Sakhr and Matthew as her guides. These videos are a sweet treat from her adventures in noshing.

A Foodie’s Paradise in London on Travel with Kate

Hungry yet? Oh, there’s more goodness to come…

A Street Food Party in London on Travel with Kate

Kate is an on-camera host, travel expert and producer of travel media. We love her charming personality and passion for engaging with locals. Keep up with her latest journeys on her website Travel with Kate, where you’ll find enough fun videos for a marathon weekend of virtual vacationing.

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San Francisco at the Forefront of the Sharing Economy

By on April 5, 2025

There have already been some great recaps of this Tuesday’s sharing economy panel by Taskrabbit and Shareable, but here’s yet another one. We’re stoked to be part of the working group that will help shape public policy around this new economy that will enable greener lifestyles, bring people closer together, and make living in the city more affordable.

“As goes San Francisco, as goes the rest of the country, as goes the rest of the world.” - David Chiu

Sharable’s Neal Gorenflo kicked it off with a touching overview of the entire movement. The sharing economy was partly driven by the economic crisis and is a new way to live more fully. “Access better supports the pursuit of happiness than ownership.” In a world where people are starting to trust one another over large institutions, we are transitioning from a top-down factory model of society to a bottom up peer-to-peer model.

The panelists, Jessica Scorpio of Getaround, Molly Turner of Airbnb, Leah Busque or TaskRabbit, Jamie Wong of Vayable, and Jay Nath of the City of San Francisco all had great, unique insights to add to the discussion. Consumption through peer-to-peer models has the ability to touch everyone across the socioeconomic spectrum, from a homeless man living in the Tenderloin to stay-at-home moms looking to earn income while maintaining flexible hours to that new graduate who is barely making rent while juggling student loans.

There are also positive externalities: cleaner air and less congestion due to fewer cars, less construction and idle spaces due to hospitality exchange, and preserved local culture due to a more authentic way to explore. A common thread was that it’s important for cities to make regulations explicit and specific around new use cases that this movement creates.

“We are in many ways a cutting edge city in terms of tech, food, transportation, all sorts of things we’re really ahead of the curve. We attract a lot of forward-thinking people who want to do things in a different and more innovative way. We’re also a really old-school city, change here is very challenging. We get a lot of reflexive push back when we’re trying to do things differently. So much of this is really about educating the city as a whole.” - Scott Wiener, San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

As this the sharing economy grows, San Francisco will lead the world in implementing public policy around it. After all, as Turner said near the end of the night, “cities exist because it’s more efficient to collaborate and share resources.”

If you have thoughts that you’d like us to relay to the working group, we’d love to do so. Please contact us at community@vayable.com.

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On Forbes: The New Way to Travel Cheap

By on March 17, 2025

We’re stoked to be covered by Forbes as part of a new way to travel on the cheap!

According to a recent report, fifty-three percent of consumers plan to travel more in 2012 than 2011—an 18 percentage point increase from 2011— despite a lack of confidence in the economy. Additionally, two-thirds of travel-bound consumers plan to increase their travel budgets. However you don’t have to spend more to make your vacation worthwhile; this year, it’s all about alternative destinations and cool search tools to save more money.

These tips for scoring travel deals will get you from office cubicle to beachside cabana without waiting on that tax return. Get ready to choose-your-own-adventure at choose-your-own-budget prices!

1) Weekend Trip: Create a trip around a cool experience. If relaxing poolside isn’t your idea of a vacation, what about a one-of-a-kind experience led by a local? New site Vayable offers unique activities you can easily build a vacation or staycation around. Created and hosted by people from all over the world, you can explore experiences in categories like Food & Wine, Social Good, and Going Up & Down Things. Here’s a glimpse of your future brag-worthy moments: make a lovo with local Fijians, take a tour of an eco-farm in Costa Rica, take a nightlife tour of Berlin’s decadent underground, or venture into your own backyard and ride a Tesla Roadster in San Francisco or take a tour of New York with a celebrity. Beats Googling “fun stuff to do in ____.”

Cool deal: Most experiences are around the $30-$60 range and as low as $3. More pricey excursions are are in the hundreds of dollars, like $500 for a daylong white water rafting trip in Uganda.

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Our Queens Guide on ABC’s The Chew!

By on January 26, 2025

One of our most loved guides hails from Jackson Heights, one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the New York City area, and was featured on ABC’s The Chew a few days ago!

If you want to check out Jeffrey’s tour for yourself, you can see what he offers here!

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After Dark, New Worlds. Jeffrey Orlick in the WSJ!

By on October 21, 2025

Our dear friend, Vayable Ambassador to New York City, and guide, Jeffrey Orlick‘s Queens Midnight Street Crawl was featured in the Wall Street Journal today! Love it!

The night began on a wary note: A bouncer relentlessly tried to kick an inebriated man out of a Mexican restaurant.

The group of eight cautiously eyed the man, patiently waiting for their al pastor tacos as two women worked the grill outside of Maravillas Restaurant. Inside, a man belted out songs in Spanish karaoke.

Most had never been to this part of Queens, where Jackson Heights blends into Elmhurst and the soundtrack is the consistent rumble of the elevated 7 train.

“For a minute I wondered if he was going to be our tour guide,” said Annie Maynard, somewhat jokingly, of the drunken man.

Ah, Roosevelt Avenue, a whole new world late at night when the streets awaken with immigrant workers, many returning home from shifts in the service industry.

Here’s a little secret: It’s at night when some of the best Mexican and Central American food is dished out, grilled and fried and sliced and diced in nocturnal food trucks and carts. The trucks are virtually full-service kitchens on wheels, with televisions blaring soccer games from back home.

Think you can’t get good Mexican food in New York? Think again.

“This is Mexican food made by Mexicans for Mexicans,” said Jeff Orlick, our real tour guide. “It’s the real thing.”

And so here we were: two Aussie tourists, six New Yorkers, a reporter, a Spanish translator and her 5-month-old baby and Mr. Orlick, a 29-year-old Woodside resident who has made it his mission to shed light on New York’s little-known culinary scene…. read more >>

“I want people to see something they’ve never even heard about,” he said, “to open their minds.”

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Vayable named the #1 Way to Earn Cash!

By on September 27, 2025

The financial blog calls offering experiences to strangers on Vayable the #1 way to earn extra cash when money is tight. Here’s a snippet:

[Vayable] allows people with specialized knowledge and talents, local info, and time on their hands to create experiences that others can purchase. It’s basically a touring and activity company without the company. Anyone can join the site and set up an experience.

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Oaksterdam Marijuana Tour on Thrillist

By on July 30, 2025

Thrillist covered our Oaksterdam University marijuana tour!

From Animal Science to Canadian Studies, there’s a major for virtually everything these days, except teaching a disorderly group of Madison Prep delinquents who’ve placed last in the Virginia Military Games eight years running the real meaning of Payne. To see how people learn without giving Damon Wayans cupcakes filled with laxatives, check out Oaksterdam University’s new monthly public tour, launching today.

Oaksterdam U is an honest-to-god cannabis college in Oakland with a complete pot-based curriculum (including Horticulture, Political Science, Biology, Canna-Business, Methods of Ingestion, etc.) all taught by marijuana-specialized academics who — starting this month — will help lead the campus’s first public tours of the facility, which’ll likely start in the vent above the bathroom stall with everyone holding silenced PP7s. Accommodating one group of 50 every 30 days, these hour-long tours’ll take you from seed to smoke, exploring the campus, growing lab, glass-blowing school, and dispensary, while previewing courses in legality, cooking, hash-making, and bud-tending, presumably taught by former Special Assistant to the Commissioner Frank Robinson. And because no tour of an institution of dank higher learning could end any other way, you’ll finish off the sojourn with a trip to Oaksterdam’s gift shop which is stocked with tees, stonerware, chronic cookbooks, smoking receptacles, and definitely not Miley Cyrus, you haters!

Oh, and if you like what you see on the tour, you can sign up for any of 15 classes, labs, and seminars that range from a weekend-only course-load to an includes-all-15-classes, 13-week semester, though that workload might prove to be a Major Pain.

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From Hipsters to Tacos: A Comic Book Tour of the Mission

By on July 12, 2025

By Jenna Paul-Schultz

The group met up at Mission Comics. We’d been promised a drawing tour of the Mission, led of Alfred Twu, one 0f the creators behind the recently released Comic Book Guide to the Mission, and Vayable, a start-up that aims to be the Etsy of tourism. On the site, individuals offer everything from seeing the sunset from a sailboat in the bay to a limo tour of Bay Area pot clubs organized by a “Medical Marijuana Concierge” to the opportunity to live like a homeless person for 24 hours, organized by a man who offers to “help you find food and at least some semblance of shelter.”

“Let’s head over to Dolores Park first,” said Twu . “We can check out the hipsters. Maybe draw them, too.”

There was the couple eating dinner at a portable picnic table set up on the grass, with a whole meal spread out before them. There was a girl dancing alone to the music in her headphones. (“Getting ready for Burning Man?” another member of the tour commented.) And then there were the classic hipsters lounging on the grass, bikes sprawled behind them, sunglasses perched on their noses: perfect characters to star in our brand new comic strips.

It was unclear, though, how many of them were real authentic hipsters, and how many of them were on Vayable’s “Live the Life of a Hipster” tour.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/inthemission/detail?entry_id=92957#ixzz1RqXUMcnQ

 

 

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Graffiti Guru Offers Street Art Tours - San Francisco Art - The Exhibitionist

By on June 22, 2025

No matter how cool you are, there’s still a pretty good chance that the only thing you know about street art is sometimes you come across it, and sometimes it’s amazing. Who did it? What’s behind it? Where can you see more? Who knows?

We do. Or, we know who knows: stencil artist Russell Howze. He’s the author of Stencil Nation, and he offers a three-hour, small-group tour called Scout for Street Art. Howze just started giving these tours two weeks ago, and promises to provide “expert explanations, stories, and background for most of the art that constantly changes on the streets.” And he’s not joking about the “expert” part.

Russell Howze

​Howze has dedicated his life to street art, especially stencils, and he knows a lot about the S.F. street art scene. “I have this particular affinity for San Francisco street art,” Howze says, “especially Mission district — there’s something really special and magical about it.”

Originally from Greenville, S.C., Howze has lived in San Francisco since 1997. Since he saw his first stencil in 1990 in Clemson, S.C., Howze has been photographing the public art in places around the world. In 2002 he created an online stencil archive, which features tens of thousands of photos of stencils. Stencil Nation, published in 2008, is the paperback extension of his site, documenting 350 artists in 28 countries.

Howze does not have a fixed schedule for his tour — you can just sign up by yourself or in a group ($37) per person and state your preferred times. The tour is run through Vayable, a company that draws on locals to give their own tours. Anyone can sign up to offer a tour, and Vayable acts as the conduit, handling bookings and payments. Vayable operates worldwide, and as one might expect, it offers numerous S.F. tours, including horseback riding on Ocean Beach, a used bookstore crawl, and a potentially perilous “Whiskey on Wheels” tour.

Vayable hosts a mixer called “A Vayable Idea” on Wednesday at 7 p.m. at Galeria de la Raza, where Howze will start the night with a 10-minute talk, “The Present Future of Street Art.” The event is free, but you can register here.

via blogs.sfweekly.com

One of our guides, Russell, who is speaking at our event tomorrow, is on SF Weekly! It’s amazing that we only met him for the first time a month ago while checking out some Banksy pieces in San Francisco!

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