There are many great reasons to book with Stay Raja Ampat, but these are our top 10:

1. On-the-ground local support for guests: The Stay Raja Ampat information centre is right near the ferry wharf at Waisai. The centre provides information and support to guests every day of the week, with local staff who know the area, the accommodation owners and what guests need to have a great stay. We also have local numbers you can call for help should any problem arise. No other accommodation provider in the region has this service. Read more here
2. 2x as many Raja Ampat accommodation options as any other site: Because Stay Raja Ampat is owned by locals and provides services uniquely suited for use by local people, more than twice as many Raja Ampat accommodation owners list with us than the largest multi-national aggregators. We offer local experiences noone else can match.
3. 5% cheaper than competitors on average: Our biggest competitors use AI pricing that makes it difficult even for accommodation owners to be sure what their prices will be on any given day, but a direct comparison of 60 listings across a range of aggregators in Feb 2026 showed Stay Raja Ampat was 5% cheaper on average. We also always pay the homestay owner exactly what they said they wanted to be paid for their accommodation, which brings us to our next point…
4. All profits go to indigenous community members: Stay Raja Ampat is run as a non-profit, meaning that after paying staff wages and for technical and support services at fixed price contracts, all money is either re-invested in the business or paid out to members of the Raja Ampat Homestay Association, who are all indigenous accommodation owners. We don’t pay for advertising, all our visitors are here organically, or by word of mouth.
5. Fair representation for local operators: This is a space for Raja Ampat locals to offer accommodation. They don’t have to share this space with foreign owned resorts or liveaboards, and the community organisation has the final say over who and what is represented on the site, and how it is represented. That means the default accommodation listing is random, changing every 2 hours, so all family businesses have a chance to be seen by guests. No-one pays more for better exposure and there’s no opportunity for exploitative practices and price wars.
6. Our mission aligns with conservation efforts: In 2017 the homestay assocation received the United Nations Development Program’s Equator Prize for sustainable development. The greatest threat to conservation of the local environment is the sale of land to foreign interests, for mining, logging, building large scale resorts and generally turning Raja Ampat into something closer to Bali or Phuket. By empowering locals to retain ownership of their lands and ensure development is on their own terms, the association and by extension Stay Raja Ampat are ensuring the success of local conservation.
7. Cooperatively set and enforced standards: Standards for accommodation, like using local materials and building methods, and what constitutes fair service, are set by association members themselves, as are all of Stay Raja Ampat’s business policies. Disputes are always settled by the community.
8. Human moderated, no scams or fake reviews: We take integrity seriously. A real human being looks at every offer on the site to ensure its legitimacy and responds to every email. New and updated listings are visited in person. All reviews by those with paid bookings, and only reviews matching paid bookings, are published. Only ratings from the last 12 months are used to calculate the overall rating, to ensure the freshness of comparison, but no review is ever taken off the site.
9. Support a reliable information source: Hard work by local teams and administrators goes into keeping the information on this site up to date, complete and relevant. We’re not just interested in selling accommodation, we want Raja Ampat to be accessible and safe for everyone. We want visitors to be culturally informed. Bookings on this site make those efforts possible.
10. Accessible ecotourism for indigenous businesses: Many, many of the listings on international aggregators are listed by middle men, because local operators don’t have the technical skills to maintain them. That means both the aggregator and the listing manager are taking their cut before the accommodation owner gets their payment. It also means accommodation owners don’t have control over what is listed and how, which means a lot of information is incorrect, and many bookings are accepted and later cancelled. We provide local support to owners, and ensure accepting or rejecting a booking is as simple as pressing a button in a local language message. We also provide in-person training, which means families without access to education or technical skills can still participate.

We encourage questions about our operations and who we are – transparency is important too. Just ask!