Hello, it’s been a while hasn’t it? We’ve published a few articles here and there over the past few months, but for those of you who’ve been following us for a few years, you’ll have noticed that our publication rate has slowed down considerably and that our travels and escapades have been put on hold for a while.
Rest assured, this little “time-out” was by no means the beginning of the end of this blog, but rather a necessary break to move on to other projects and create the conditions to continue here in parallel. In short, after more than a year of “sedentary life”, we thought we’d take a look back and share our thoughts on what’s driving us at the moment and our medium-term projects.
Alpiness Coliving – our baby has grown up!
We explained it here, but in April 2023 we moved into the beautiful village of Les Haudères to launch our coliving project. For the first 5 months, we worked hard with a team of volunteers to renovate 100% of the interior of this former hotel, which had remained closed for 12 years.
In September 2023, Alpiness coliving officially opened its doors and we welcomed our first customers. After that, things moved at a frenetic pace… After less than a month, we were already fully booked. November and December were quieter times (we closed for the holidays to take some time off). What happened next? Word of mouth started to spread, and from January to mid-April we were 100% booked.
In mid-April we re-closed for 1 month to redo some work (we self-built a block room in our basement, enlarged our laundry room and made lots of small improvements to the rest of the house).
Since May 15, we’ve been open again and our occupancy rate has exceeded all our wildest dreams! We don’t have a single room available until September, and our winter 2025 is already 100% booked.
We really believed in this coliving project (and believe us, we had to fight hard to convince the banks of its viability). Many people told us that we were completely crazy to imagine that 10 to 15 people a month would be willing to pay to come and work remotely from a small village of 300 inhabitants in the Swiss Alps and moreover in the off-season.
So, obviously, we don’t want to draw any long-term conclusions just yet, but this first year shows us just how right we were to insist and invest so much time and energy in this project. Yes, we opened last year, but things didn’t happen overnight…
Since 2021, we’d been taking steps, meeting politicians and tourist offices to present our project, and putting together an impressive number of presentation files and business plans. Several times we thought we’d found a building, a village or at least a serious lead, but each time the stars didn’t align and the project stalled more than once. All in all, it took us almost 3 years to open the coliving, from the first steps to the opening aperitif. 3 years with a lot of doubts, a lot of promising meetings, a few slaps in the face, a few tears (of joy and rage) and, above all, hundreds – or rather, thousands – of hours turning the project upside down.
In short, when we finally received the “OK” from the banks and the person who sold us the building in January 2023, we were over the moon! After that, I’ll let you read our 2023 review, and you’ll see that 2023 wasn’t all glitter and rainbows 😉
Nomads at heart, happily settled
It’s funny, because many of you have asked us how we are coping with this new sedentary lifestyle, and how we feel about not being able to roam around as much as we used to… I’ve been thinking a lot about this and it’s pretty crazy because I’ve hardly missed traveling this past year. Perhaps for lack of time to think about it, but also because I feel we’ve really come to the right place. Switzerland, the Valais and especially the Val d’Hérens are places that correspond to us 2000%, and it’s without the slightest hesitation that I’m telling you today that I’m fulfilled in my sedentary lifestyle.
After all, it’s all relative, because our lives are miles away of those we had when we were sedentary, working in companies in Zurich or Vienna 😉 Every day, coliving brings us its share of surprises, encounters, fascinating exchanges and even gastronomy from all over the world. The peaks of the Val d’Hérens are an endless 4-season playground, and we’ve only scratched the surface of what there is to see and do around here. So, for the moment, we’re not traveling that much “physically”, but we’re still resolutely in a world of encounters, exchanges and discoveries.
And a sedentary lifestyle also has its advantages. We’ve created a cocoon in which we feel good, we’re creating lasting bonds with new people and we’ve also resumed a better sporting routine. We’ve never been as active as we have over the last few months, and we’re really enjoying discovering more of the joys of skiing, ski touring, mountain running, climbing and so on.
And we still have our Dahu van. Although it’s been more of a moving truck than a van over the last few months, we’re planning to put it back into service soon 😉 One thing’s for sure, though, and that’s that he’ll be back again and again to find his little place in the village of Les Haudères, and that makes us happy!
What’s our day-to-day life like? What exactly do we do when we run a coliving facility?
Well, that’s all very well, we tell you about our life in the mountains, our new outdoor passions, the fact that we have less time to devote to the blog… But what exactly do we do all day? 😉 It’s funny, because even some of our friends and family seem to wonder about that, so I figure it must intrigue some of you too.
It’s always hard to explain, because despite our sedentary lifestyle, routine isn’t exactly what defines our daily lives. To tell you the truth, we’re striving to find some form of routine, but for the moment this rascal is still keeping a low profile.
I’m deliberately not going to mention the renovation periods, because for those you’ll have no trouble imagining us working 10 hours a day with a drill, sander or circular saw in our hands. When the coliving is open, you have to imagine that there are between 10 and 15 of us sharing a house of around 550m2.
Together with Benoit, we manage the admin side of things (by which we mean the website, reservations, invoicing, emails, accounting) as well as the logistical side (buying cleaning and maintenance products, small repairs around the house (cuckoo for leaky toilets or spontaneous water damage). Alongside this, we are usually supported by 1-2 volunteers to manage all the day-to-day tasks, such as cleaning (common areas and bedrooms), laundry, communal meals, taking care of the vegetable garden and simply answering our residents’ questions.
Coliving is a place where people come to work from remotely, but also to share time together and explore the local area. Every week, we organize several outings (sporting, cultural or gourmet) but we also plan a program in the house (movie nights, game nights, skillshares and workshops, etc.).
And last but not least, Benoit and I are committed to investing in the region where we are based, and we try with what energy we have left to participate in local development projects. This part is still in progress, but to give you an example, we are currently working in collaboration with the municipality to open a public work and meeting space in the village, which will be open to our residents as well as to locals and tourists (and we’re very excited about this prospect).
And what about Novo-Monde?
After several months of suffering a little, we’re slowly managing to free up a few half-days a week to work on our computers. But it’s always difficult to plan ahead… We’re never safe from a coffee machine breakdown or a water leak in the house that upsets our plans for the day. Our life is a bit chaotic at the moment, but we’ve chosen this chaos and we love it just as much. 🙂
Novo-Monde, Novo-Media, book projects – choices had to be made
If this past year has taught us one thing, it’s that it was simply no longer possible for us to continue with all our various projects. We’ll be honest, during our renovations we didn’t even ask ourselves any questions; we were literally absorbed by the work and everything else was put aside without a second thought.
Once the coliving was up and running and we were getting to grips with our day-to-day management tasks, we took a step back and started estimating how much time we had available each week for our other projects. The result? Not so much time after all… 😉
The decision as to whether or not to continue with certain activities didn’t really even arise that much. Novo-Monde has been our pet project for over 12 years now, so it was only natural that we decided to put what little focus we had into it. Novo-Media was (and still is) a project we enjoyed creating, but at the moment we simply don’t have the time to devote to it. The same goes for the books… We’ve had a lot of fun publishing the various Randos Bière and our ebooks, and quite honestly there’s no shortage of ideas for writing more. But for the moment it’s just not possible (anymore). We’ll see what the future brings 😉
Novo-Monde: few articles but a lot of work behind the scenes
While on the surface relatively little has happened on the blog (only 10 articles published in 1 year), we’ve put a lot of work into it to tell you the truth… It’s a part we don’t talk about as much, but as the blog grows, the “background” work becomes more and more important. Novo-Monde now boasts over 1,000 articles/pages, and while it would be easy to simply publish new content, we also feel it’s vital to keep old articles up to date so that they remain relevant. In short, as the blog grows, this part of our business takes up more and more of our time.
For 2 years now, we haven’t been alone on the blog. Hélène joined our team in August 2022, and it’s largely thanks to her that our older articles are always up to date. She recently updated most of the world tour content (all the articles on Asian countries and South America, as well as our ebook in web format). Thanks again for everything, Hélène!
Recently, Google has made some major changes to its algorithms, and “small” content creators like us are having a hard time. The reasons for this are unclear, but what is certain is that big sites like Reddit, Quora or even social networks and institutional sites have been largely favored. For people like us who have always been tech-savvy and like to keep an eye on what’s happening on the SEO scene, we’ll admit that this is the first time we haven’t quite understood what’s been going on.
We’ve tried to correct the situation (although we still need to understand what to correct lol), but we’re clearly on a downward slope. We know that some of our blogging buddies have seen their traffic drop by as much as 80%. Fortunately, the damage is more limited for us, but it’s still very worrying.
Bref, on vous donne rendez-vous dans le bilan de fin d’année pour faire les comptes, mais nous ne cachons pas être un peu frustrés par ces changements.
Our ambitions with Novo-Monde? How is it to run a travel blog in 2024?
Let’s face it… we’re not sure. From the outset, Novo-Monde was a project that has always been made out of, but the reality is that over the years it has also become our main source of income. From the outset, we’ve tried to diversify as much as possible, and I think we’re doing pretty well in that respect. But there’s still a big question mark over whether we’ll be able to continue to rely on income from our work on the blog in the years to come.
Our goal has never been to become a millionaire, and we’ve always refused intrusive advertising, dubious partnerships and the like. Our only way of making money is through affiliate (i.e. recommending products or services we use and earning a commission if you decide to use our links). But a drop in traffic almost automatically means a drop in revenue.
In short, at the moment, our ambitions aren’t very “ambitious”. We’re just hoping to keep things afloat and get back on track. We’ll certainly continue to update our content. But the aim is also, and above all, to resume more regular publication of informative articles on hikes and sharing some well-known and little-known areas of Switzerland and neighbouring countries. Blogging has always been a pleasure, and although we’re interested in SEO, we’re not going to let algorithms dictate what we write.
Our projects: Travel more, more often and less far away
It’s all nice to tell you about our sedentary lives and the behind-the-scenes stories behind the blog, but running a travel blog without traveling is a bit of a “complicated”, wouldn’t you agree? And that’s just as well, because even though we’re loving our life in the mountains, Benoit and I are still passionate about travelling and are still as curious to go explore different areas. It’s just that now, we’ve chosen to have a few more constraints in our daily lives, and that’s bound to have an impact on our ability to take off spontaneously 😉
But as we develop a routine in coliving, as the business stabilizes and we surround ourselves more and more with people we trust, we feel we’re starting to find a little more flexibility. Are we going to drop everything tomorrow and take off with the van for 6 months? Probably not… On the other hand, we’re getting to the stage where going away for 2-3 days is no longer impossible.
In fact, that’s one of our summer projects: to manage to free up 3-4 days a month to explore a new area of Switzerland or a border region. In autumn, we’ve set aside 3 weeks to go further for a romantic getaway (with the van and Winchy, of course). We’ll tell you more about it soon, but it’s a done deal: we’ll be back on the road again 😉
In short, as you’ll have gathered, we’re ending this first year of sedentary life a little tired, but infinitely happy. We sincerely hope to find more time to share with you our various trips around Switzerland and Europe, as well as, why not, a few more distant trips in the upcoming months.
See you soon for new articles. A little bird tells me that our first getaway with Dahu and Winchy is scheduled for next week 😉 Where do you think we’re going?
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