Resolving conflicts intelligently on Smart Trip Platform

We are building much more than a travel booking platform — we are building a living, dynamic community that can expand and evolve on its own. In the Smart Trip Platform ecosystem, travelers will be able to make new friends, find travel buddies, and exchange experience.

However, even in the friendliest of communities disputes do happen. Many things go wrong during a trip, and travelers are not happy with the quality of services they receive. Here are a few examples of situations than can give rise to a disagreement:

• Booked room is unavailable when the tourist arrives at the hotel;
• - Tourist is dissatisfied with the conditions: it is noisy, dirty, there is no hot water, etc.;
• - Something unexpected and unpleasant happens: the tourist’s valuables are stolen, or their food disappears from the hostel fridge, or there is a flood in the bathroom…
• - Booked tour turns out to be disappointing: the guide is boring or doesn’t speak proper English, some destinations included in the tour are not actually visited, the car breaks down, and so on.
• - Final price does not correspond to what was originally discussed.
• - Pictures on the site do not correspond to the actual place.
• - Hotel owner is unhappy with the guest’s behavior.

Surely, you can come up with other examples! In all these situations, one way to try and solve the issue is to scream, make a scene, write a complaint and perhaps a bad review on TripAdvisor. At Smart Trip Platform, we offer a different and more efficient way to do things. Our conflict resolution method is arbitration.

What is arbitration? It’s when you ask an independent third party to judge between the conflicting sides. Arbitration is widely used in business, and it is quickly gaining traction in blockchain, too, since it fits the decentralization philosophy so well. Some people think that blockchain community should depend only on smart contracts (that is, if you paid for a hotel and you didn’t like it, it’s your problem), but most agree that the crypto industry needs human mechanisms for resolving disputes.

So who are the arbiters — or arbitrators, as you prefer? At Smart Trip Platform, top-rated users will be able to participate in the arbitration commission — though they won’t be forced to do it, of course. In general, whenever a dispute arises and one of the parties decides to initiate an arbitration case (we will have a special button for this), the system will send automatic invitations to the 50 users with the highest rating.

The exact number of arbitrators for different types of cases will vary. If the necessary number of potential arbitrators do not reply within a specified time, the system will send out invitations to the top-rated users with the ranks 51–100, and so on.

Being an arbitrator won’t be a charitable exercise, of course — arbitration will be paid, and paid well! All arbitrators will receive TASH tokens for their work, and their rating will grow even further. This way, we give our most active users a possibility to monetize their experience. They will be able to spend their arbitration rewards on trips and travel services on the platform!

It is the parties that will pay the arbitration fees, of course — this way we will limit the number of arbitration cases to those that are really important to people, important enough to pay a fee for. We believe that the arbitration system will play an important regulating and civilizing role in the Smart Trip Platform community, creating a group of natural influencers whose opinion will be valued.

Do you have your own ideas about how arbitration should work? Then share them in the comments! And of course, don’t forget that Smart Trip Platform pre-ICO is in full swing — this week you can get a 18% discount on our TASH tokens at smarttripplatform.io! Join us right now!