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Innovation continues to propel the travel industry forward. By introducing blockchain technology into hotel booking spaces, the recently launched startup adds a new dimension to the booking process and is changing the way the hospitality and events industry interacts with customers.
Life Rewards.ai
As travelers become more familiar with cryptocurrencies and wallets, the online travel agency (OTA) model is ripe for disruption by blockchain technology. Ready or not, here are hotel reservations that can be bought and traded like non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Liferewards.ai provides hotel bookings and event tickets that are digitized and converted into collectible NFTs. Customers can earn rewards based on actions that can be easily tracked using blockchain technology. You can also sell or trade reservations on the secondary market. Broadway ticket.
Eduardo Ibañez, Chief Data Scientist at Liferewards.ai, said: “With NFTs representing hotel stays and event tickets, Liferewards.ai showcases where travelers are, where they are and where they are going, and enables those bookings to be traded in an open marketplace. We are developing a similar solution for bookings, but with a focus on hotels and events at launch.”
What does it mean that a hotel reservation is NFT?
As soon as a hotel is booked, travelers get an NFT that acts as a unique reservation that can be sold or traded securely and seamlessly up to 24 hours prior to check-in. Travelers can pay with credit cards or cryptocurrencies. As soon as the payment is processed, the system will create her NFT, which the traveler can see in their wallet. They can then use it, sell it, trade it, or show it off in their own wallets.
Blockchain is great at authentication (seeing who bought what and when), allowing two people to easily, cheaply, and securely exchange tokens representing reservations.
“The option of making reservations tradable on the secondary market is attractive to many travelers, especially if their plans change frequently,” says Ibañez. “Hotels also benefit from having a secondary market.”
Benefits for hotels
By creating reservations that can be traded on the secondary market without losing value, rather than canceling when a traveler’s plans change, Liferewards.ai helps hotels manage revenue more seamlessly and increase We promise to help you solve your cancellation rate problem.
“If a hotel has a cancellation policy that allows you to cancel 24 hours in advance, it’s better if you don’t have to worry about discounting the room to let other people in,” Ibañez said.
The platform should also help hotels reduce their customer acquisition costs. For example, a large hotel can pre-sell inventory a year in advance of him, thus maintaining occupancy rates and reducing risk.
“The sooner it sells out, the better,” Aibáñez said. “We are simultaneously solving traveler and hotel problems by creating value from a now dead asset – bookings.”
Liferewards.ai partners with OTAs and major hotel brands to enable the platform to compete on price and offer a huge number of hotels. Ibañez says it can lower rates and prices because its customers belong to a closed user group. “You won’t see the discount anywhere else.”
Ultimately, hotels will be able to set rules for NFTs, so they receive royalty payments every time a booking token is traded. “We are not there yet, but it is possible, because using blockchain, he can programmatically code the distribution of royalties into NFTs.”
loyalty play
In addition to partnering with hotels, Liferewards.ai works closely with event and experience providers to package event tickets and hotel reservations to offer unique perks to travelers.
“We will allow travelers to earn loyalty points based on various interactions within the network,” said Ibañez. “A traveler who has booked a particular hotel 10 times he has been called the ‘community manager’ of that hotel or destination and will earn extra points on all subsequent bookings if he provides inside information about the location.” . Our decentralized travel platform allows every traveler, whether they are the best hotel reviewers or the best tour guides, to use their strengths and generate revenue. We provide value to their interactions. ”
Future iterations of the platform will allow travelers to discover and unlock rewards placed at specific longitudes and latitudes in the real world via augmented reality. An attempt to gamify the process of earning and redeeming rewards, these so-called “quests” let you visit specific statues in Rome to unlock discounts on events and hotels, or curated by local Kentucky experts. A must visit whiskey bar.
Future prospects
Ibañez is concerned that the lack of liquidity in other NFT marketplaces could affect sales volumes, but it operates on the blockchain but is tied solely to cryptocurrencies. Liferewards.ai claims it will not be adversely affected by recent crypto market volatility. .
“Our technology stack is built, we have access to an inventory of millions of hotel rooms, and we have built some great partnerships,” said Ibañez. “We grow as fast as we can get customers.”
From a marketing perspective, that means focusing on attracting young, affluent travelers who like to go to events, and focusing on nearby hotels that are popular with those travelers. .
“For some travelers, our NFTs simply represent a record of their bookings, but for others they are collectibles. I have something to say: Your NFT proves, for example, that you attended the Super Bowl and stayed in the same hotel as Rhianna.”
If the platform takes off, as Aybáñez believes, people who like to brag about their travel experiences on Instagram will have to step up their game.
Click here for more information on Liferewards.ai.
This content was co-created by Liferewards.ai and SkiftX, Skift’s branded content studio.
