04 · Pro bono · Ekas Bay, Lombok · 2026
given, not billed
A homestay in Lombok that guests can finally book direct.
Rasta and his nephew Hengki host surfers on a bay in south east Lombok. We stayed with them, they looked after us like family, and we found they had nothing of their own online. So we built them a website and gave it to them.
rastahomestay.com ↗9.5
Guest score across 51 Booking.com reviews
0
Invoiced, and nothing taken per booking
1.2s
Largest paint on a throttled 4G phone
4
Breaks in the bay, written up for surfers
30
Photographs sorted, cut and prepared
309KB
The whole homepage, in 18 requests
Why this one
Ekas Buana is a working Sasak village at the end of a long road in south east Lombok, and Rasta Homestay is a small family place a five minute walk from the water. Rasta runs it, his nephew Hengki guides the surf. We stayed there. They are the kind of hosts who greet you with a hand on their heart, who sort your board and your boat before you have thought to ask, and who make a room in a quiet village feel like somewhere you were expected.
They are trying to grow the homestay, and the thing standing in the way was not the welcome or the waves. It was that a traveller searching for them found nothing they owned.
What they had, and what it cost them
Everything ran through the booking sites. Guests found the homestay on Booking.com or Agoda, and the homestay paid a commission on every night. It works, and it is also the reason a place rated 9.5 for the welcome takes home less than the rate a guest paid.
There was no address of their own to put on a board rack, an Instagram bio or a message to a friend. A returning guest who already knew Rasta by name still had to go back through a platform to book a second stay.
What we built
Four pages that load fast on a village connection: the homestay, the surf, the rooms, and how to actually get there, because getting to Ekas is genuinely the hardest part of the trip. Every booking button opens WhatsApp with the message already written, so a guest taps once and Rasta answers on the phone he already has in his hand. There is no dashboard to learn and no password to lose.
Everything a guest reads sits in one file of plain facts. Rates, rooms, what breakfast is, what the surf does. Change it in one place and it changes across the site, which is what makes this something they can keep rather than something that quietly goes out of date.
Honest, on purpose
The site says the showers are cold, the rooms are simple, the village is quiet, and you will hear the call to prayer in the morning. That reads like a strange thing to write on a page meant to sell rooms. It is the reason the reviews sit at 9.5. The only guests who leave disappointed are the ones who came expecting a resort, so the page turns them away before they book.
The guest scores are shown with the platform that awarded them named alongside, and are not dressed up as the homestay's own rating. Direct rates were set below the platform price, so booking straight with Rasta is genuinely the better deal for both sides.
Handing it over
It is built to be theirs. The site is finished and live, and the last steps belong to the owners: the domain moves into Rasta's name, and Hengki adds the swell, wind and tide detail on the four breaks that only a guide who surfs them every day can write.
There was no invoice, there is no retainer, and there is no share of the bookings. We do not do this often. When we meet people like Rasta and Hengki, we do it.