From hotel room reservations to customer reward points and supply chain management, travel blockchains offer a wide range of applications. Start-ups on blockchain-based travel portals, consumer reviews, business model disintermediation, supply chain management, and other topics are urgently needed.
The essential element of the travel and tourism industry that sets it apart from others is its ability to grow and create jobs while requiring less capital input. Because India is a popular tourist destination, blockchain technology, if embraced, has the potential to revolutionise the industry because it is fast, efficient, and verifiable, and it cannot be wiped over time. To validate new blocks, it uses a peer-to-peer network, which requires a network majority.
Another example of smart contracts is blockchain-based travel portals. A smart contract on the blockchain could send an acknowledgment or token access mechanism to the physical asset or user e-wallet, such as a one-time QR code to open a rental car or hotel room. TamTam Travels, based in the United Kingdom, established a business model based on a membership site that provides savings on benefits and services. This is true for both international and domestic travel, with potential savings of thousands of dollars.
Customer loyalty and incentive programmes could benefit from blockchain travel portals. In the loyalty incentives area, ‘Chain of Points,’ a blockchain-based currency, offers merchants and customers a simple and flexible solution.
It has cryptocurrency functions built in to serve as a technical backbone for the loyalty and gift card industries. Merchants and customers establishing loyalty rewards programmes will benefit from the liquidity and ability to trade ‘points.’
Another area of blockchain application is customer reviews, which include well-known travel sites that aggregate reviews, ratings, images, contact information, and opinions on tourism service providers. These online user-generated ratings are profoundly altering the travel sector by creating some firms and ruining others in a world where knowledge flows instantly.
In the opaque world of tourism customer evaluations, ‘Buuyers,’ a Paris-based start-up that aims to provide a customer review management solution based on blockchain technology, boosted both transparency and legitimacy.
Another notable example, which has been investigated in Japan, is blockchain-based donation for historical conservation. A start-up called Coincheck launched a Bitcoin donation platform, and cultural conservation initiatives in Japan benefited immensely from it. Donors might contribute money to their favourite charities by scanning a QR code. Because every donation is traceable and transparent, it avoids the transaction fees associated with international bank transfers, acting as an incentive for donors who are hesitant to donate to opaque programmes. Another advantage is that when making a donation, contributors are not required to submit their name or email address.
Another prominent application is business model disintermediation, sometimes known as the peer-to-peer economy. The advent of blockchain technology has opened the door to new disintermediated business models.
Many industries are liberated from unbalanced regulatory and licensing schemes that are subject to hierarchical power structures and vested interests’ influence on government. As a result, blockchain technology enables the worldwide disintermediation and decentralisation of all transactions of any kind between all participants. It’s worth noting that blockchain-based crowdfunding platforms allow businesses to raise capital by developing their own digital currencies. In a crowdfunding campaign, investors are given tokens that reflect shares in the start-up they are supporting.
