Chatting your way to a great trip — how Smart Trip Platform will use chats in a myriad ways
Smart Trip Platform aims to bring travelers and travel businesses together directly, without any intermediaries. This means they will be able to communicate — easily, instantly, and efficiently. It’s something that most travel startups don’t realize — the era of middlemen is over.
How many times were you planning a trip and wishing desperately to be able to contact a hotel or tour company right there and then? Instead, the best that most travel resources can offer you is a “contact us” form or a “leave your comments for the property” field. True, any companies nowadays have Facebook groups where you can ask your question, but in most cases you have no choice but to write an email or fill a form, hit send, and wait for a reply.
Here are just a couple examples:
- Having to drive from Italy to Slovakia in one day and desperately trying to find hotels along the way that would accept check-ins after 11 pm;
- Arriving at our guesthouse in Shangri-La only to find out that it didn’t exist anymore;
- Organizing a jungle trip in the Tambopata reserve in Peru and having to contact 15+ different local operators for prices and itineraries — it took a week to pick one!
- Arranging a climb of the Chachani peak (the easiest 6000m peak in the world that can scaled by most fit people — highly recommended) near Arequipa and not having the standard two days to do it — it took dozens of emails and Facebook messages to find a company that was willing to help us.
Surely, you can think of some examples of your own!
Many members on the Smart Trip Platform team are experienced travelers, and we know that efficient communication between a traveler and a travel service provider is one of the weakest links in the existing travel platforms. This is understandable: those websites act as intermediaries and take their cut — up to 35% percent in the case of Booking.com, for example. Now imagine what happens if clients and service providers (hotels in this case) are allowed to talk directly to each other.
Many of them will simply take the conversation outside of the platform, negotiate directly, and settle on a price that will be better for both. (Of course, a trust issue will instantly arise — if the customer does not arrive, the hotel will have an empty room and lose money. That keeps many properties on large booking platforms in spite of the high fees.)
So how is Smart Trip Platform going solve the issue? Aren’t we afraid to let customers and businesses talk to each other? No, we aren’t. First of all, the use of smart contracts will help us keep transaction fees low enough for people not to have any motivation to circumvent the platform. Indeed, they won’t save anything by trying to send and accept payments by other means. Smart Trip Platform will be simply the cheapest and most efficient way to process bookings.
Second, we will, of course, take some basic precautions. We will use a special algorithm that will filter out email addresses and phone numbers of the counterparts from the chat until a booking is made and the smart contract is deployed.
We have no problem with travelers and businesses chatting and working out the details of their deal. In fact, for many kinds of activities — like trekking, customized tours, and so on — this kind of discussion is essential, since every tourist can have his or her own preferences, limitations, and even allergies! A standard cookie-cutter booking system simply won’t work — perhaps that’s why there isn’t such a system on the market right now.
Do you have an example of a situation when you really needed to contact a travel company or hotel directly — and couldn’t do it? Then share in the comments! And remember to join us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/STplatform/ and Twitter https://twitter.com/st_platform !
