Blockchain experts outline benefits for travel in a decentralized future

Blockchain technology will bring more benefits to travel a panel of industry experts told delegates at last week’s World Travel Market.

Decentralized networks will enable businesses to trade with each other and unify data more easily and efficiently, and data will be both more secure and immutable, making it more reliable.

Blockchain will also enable customers of travel companies to take more control over their own data, allowing them to decide which brands they share it with in exchange for loyalty and booking incentives.

Traveltainment and Peakwork founder Ralf Usbeck, who is developing the Chain4Travel blockchain mainnet for travel, said the technology will revolutionize how firms buy and sell from each other by consolidating multiple processes into one.

“What you can’t do with today’s technology is that you can’t trade a product and the money in the same logical second. You will have a provider API and a payment API. They are separate. With blockchain, you can define both parts in the contracts.

“Validations check whether there is enough money in the wallet on the other side. If the answer is yes, they give the money and take the ticket or product in the same logical second.

“You can pay the travel agency, an IT provider, a hotel in the same logical second. If something goes wrong, if there is not enough money, the whole transaction is stopped.”

Roberto Da Re, founder of B2B payment and reconciliation platform Travel Ledger that supports Chain4Travel, said the immutability of data on blockchain is one of its most important features.

“You know that once that transaction is written, it can’t be changed. Immediately, it also builds trust. You can really trust the data.”

Da Re said this improves audit trails and transparency, making smart contracts a valuable way to hold data over time. “Everyone can see that the transaction was carried out like this. Parties who have access to the data are the only ones who can see it and actually change it.

“To be able to modify the transaction, you must be the one who has the private key for that wallet or smart contract.”

Matthew Hairsnape, founder of Triend, a review site that uses blockchain to give review authors greater ownership and control over their own data and content, said immutability offers “huge opportunities” in travel by giving digital assets a verified and guaranteed value that can be exchanged and traded.

“Having a digital resource that you own will open up a whole new secondary market for travel. You can sell a flight you can’t take on.”

Hairsnape said blockchain will end the era of control by single centralized entities and instead see the rise of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) that will support new “beautiful projects” due to transparency and accountability.

He said “at the moment there is a lot broken in the trust system”, including the problem of fake reviews that can be solved with Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) that confirm the validity of the review and give it a true value.

Don Birch, CEO of Simard, which uses the Winding Tree decentralized ecosystem, said blockchain has been talked about for decades, but he believes it’s time.

“In the early years, blockchain was the constant refrain I heard from people, a solution in search of a problem. Now I think we’ve gotten to the point where it might finally be a solution to a problem.”

Read the full article at travolution.co.uk