How Could Blockchain Transform the Way We Travel? TravelChain CEO Explains
Ilya Orlov, one of the founders of TravelChain, а decentralized data exchange for the travel industries, believes that Blockchain technology gives a prodigious opportunity for travel industry players. Travellers can now earn money for sharing their experience directly and safely with travel businesses, and the companies can integrate new products and services easier by using Blockchain.
Fast and powerful
Ilya Orlov explains that unlike others TravelChain platform has their own graphene-based Blockchain, which allows travel companies to integrate into the system and create their business models on top of the platform provided by TC.
The difference between graphene-based and a “standard” Blockchain is that Graphene-based Blockchain allows users to make the public information available for every part of the system, while safely encrypting the private information. Individual users own the private keys to their data in order to control secure storage in real time. Ilya Orlov adds on:
"At this moment there is no Blockchain faster and more powerful than Graphene-based. Moreover, the community of this technology is ideologically close to us. We share and build the hypothesis of gathering, storing and transferring data in the Blockchain."
Other side of the coin
While planning a trip travelers browse hundreds of websites, blogs, forums, read articles, reviews, watch videos. All this content is created for free by millions of people because they want to share their experience with their friends, colleagues or even the whole world. But it doesn’t occur to them that they are creating value and don’t get any reward for it. That’s exactly what TravelChain is built for: to change this whole experience for the better.
However, fellow travelers are not the only ones to benefit from the platform. The small and medium-sized business can cut their costs in half, improve and target their offer and grow in leaps by using the data that the users are willing to sell.
Ilya explains how that works
“Traveler Passport” is a key component of TravelChain functioning. It is a model with distributed trust which allows you to form an image of another person without being acquainted personally.”
The idea is to collect such profiles called “passports” by motivating travelers to share their information in exchange for a reward. Users get travel tokens for sharing the info such as preferences (in food or entertainment, for example), location, the way of living and traveling, etc. The question which appears in minds “who needs this data and how it will be used?”
Orlov clarifies that the primary consumers of this information are travel businesses, also using the TravelСhain platform. These companies will buy potential customers data with travel tokens, and travelers, at their end, will get travel tokens as a reward. Here is the explanation of how it works with a real example:
“For instance, say you have a vegetarian restaurant, thanks to TravelChain you´ll find out that there are 150 vegetarians currently living in the neighborhood. You can purchase the more specific data like their tastes and preferences in exchange for Travel Tokens. Once you get the information, the users will receive the tokens as a reward.”
According to Orlov, data is a private issue. Travellers might be hesitant to share their personal information with the third party. He believes the user is to decide which information they are ready to share and with which categories of he fellow platform members. Besides, once shared, the personal data will be as safe as it could be using Blockchain.
The road ahead
Orlov says, Blockchain universe evolves within the travel sector, TravelChain makes it possible to integrate new products and services without excessive investment costs or overly complicated implementation efforts.
“We have ambitious plans for 2018. The key point is that we do not compete with anyone, we are striving to make the market and services better by integrating the industry.”
Currently one of the top priorities for TravelChain is to integrate with travel businesses. As of now, they have an agreement with IZI.Travel, tourister.ru, tvil.ru, more agreements are under discussion and soon to be announced.
Another step in the list is their aim to is the integration with EOS.io Infrastructure for Decentralized Applications. TravelChain is planning to allocate smart contracts for the most apps within the Travel Chain platform on EOS.
To summarize, Orlov explained his view on humanity future through Blockchain development:
“Blockchain platforms like TravelChain could completely change the landscape of the travel market with users taking an active part in creating value, communicating and sharing data directly avoiding intermediaries and aggregators.”