How can hospitality benefit from this technology? When asked about use cases in hospitality, interviewees typically viewed blockchain as a tool used to facilitate financial transactions and focus on cryptocurrency acceptance.
The corporate travel industry is always exposed to disruption: personal travel disruptions like canceled flights, strategic disruptions like mergers and acquisitions, and existential disruptions like, 'Do I really need to take this trip when I could Zoom it instead?'
Efforts to create decentralized, blockchain-based travel booking platforms have been in development for several years but now two new systems are debuting – one for hotels and the other for short-term rentals.
Blockchain is great for creating trustless networks. When you have actors that operate in similar industries and often compete with each other, they’re worried about each other knowing too much and don’t want to partner with competitors. But, when you have a fragmented industry as big and important as travel where there are so many competitors but they could also find ways to collaborate.
Blockchain is one of the biggest buzzwords in technology today, but confusion exists about what it is exactly. Wharton's Kevin Werbach provides clarity in his new book.
In 2017, blockchain projects flourished, where ICOs managed to raise billions. 2018 was a crash year for cryptos, even though the sums raised this year were twice as high as the previous one. Blockchain projects promised a lot, however 71% of them still have no working products. The argument was that blockchain is still in its infancy, and many are supposed to deliver their products in 2019. And one of the best places to watch where blockchain will rise again is in the travel industry.
In recent years much has been said about the transformative power of blockchain – the distributed, encrypted ledger technology that powers Bitcoin.
Pedro Anderson, founder and COO of the nonprofit travel distribution platform Winding Tree, is something of an evangelist for open-source computer code, calling it 'the only way to truly innovate.'
Blockchain technology will 'eliminate the need for powerful third parties' in travel and 'challenge the status quo', according to Philip Wolf, founder of travel technology analyst Phocuswight.
Blockchain applications could disrupt how the world manages environmental resources, helping to drive sustainable growth and value creation