Meet CityOn
With CityOn, tourists can securely share their data to enhance their destination experience
Marketing Exec Araina Pereira of the Centrality Accelerator powered by Lightning Lab shares more about the current cohort. To track the progress of the accelerator programme, follow Centrality on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and join our community on Centrality’s Official Telegram.
Sam Brodie is the Customer Experience and Design Lead for City On. Here’s what he has to say about their journey so far:
What is the problem you are wanting to solve?
Online travel agencies (OTA) have a 41% market share in America for online accommodation bookings. This deprives accommodation providers of their ability to project and control their own brand. Furthermore, accommodation providers receive more for accommodation that has been booked through their own website than bookings made through OTAs.
This has forced accommodation providers to compete on price, rather than brand and other offerings. Online customers prefer using OTAs because of the choices available and transparent pricing. Positive experiences at hotels booked through OTAs are perceived as being just as attributable to the OTA as they are the hotel.
The critical component of this inequitable distribution of value is that the OTA is the party that collects the customer data in full, and the accommodation provider receives only a fragment of this information. The OTA can then use this information to make targeted offerings for tours and activities in the area; depriving the accommodation providers of the onselling opportunity that concierges and similar service providers are meant to capitalise upon.
Why have you chosen blockchain for your solution?
We believe in the blockchain’s fundamental ability to remove middlemen. OTAs provide little marginal value and siphon a great deal of revenue away from the value creators. By providing verified identities for tourists that can be used with their accommodation providers, we provide value to the accommodation providers through increased visibility over data and an expansion of their on-selling opportunities.
Why did you want to be apart of the accelerator?
We’re pioneering a complex business model, and needed to partner with an organisation that understands blockchain and can simplify that aspect of the business model. This leaves us free to enjoy the benefits of building on the blockchain, while still focusing on providing value to our customers and stakeholders. We’re also looking into potential partnerships with other decentralised apps (dApps) built on the centrality system.
What has been your greatest learning so far on your journey?
Most of our learning has come from balancing the value that can be provided to the various stakeholders in the tourism industry. For example, CityOn may be able to improve the tourism experience for a traveller, but the system is only going to take hold with sufficient value provided to the actual gatekeepers needed to reach that critical mass.
What has been the biggest success/highlight/achievement so far for your business?
I think the quality of responses that we’ve gathered in our market validation have been our greatest highlight. We are confident that a problem definitely exists — it’s a multi-faceted one that draws in a large number of stakeholders. It’s been exciting to illuminate this industry-wide push for a fairer distribution of tourism revenue, and gradually build a picture of how a profitable system can give life to that collective dissatisfaction.
How did you decide on a name?
Our ultimate vision for CityOn is that it encapsulates the entire tourist experience in any given city. By removing friction and redundancies, our hope is that the overall experience is reinvigorated (i.e. switched “on”).
What has been the biggest hurdle that you have overcome?
Carving away our assumptions was quite difficult. There are a lot of common perceptions of tourism and tourists that aren’t really evidenced in the statistics, and this has surprised us at times when we’ve realised that some stakeholders are much more or less important than suspected when we began our journey.
What’s your why?
We’ve launched CityOn because of blockchain’s potential to create more equitable distributions of payments and decrease the number of middlemen. There is an untapped desire for this equitable change, and we believe that we can profit while creating enormous benefit in building a system that allows for this change.
What has been the funniest thing that has happened whilst on the accelerator?
The weekly “good-bad-ugly” sessions are undoubtedly my favourite part of the accelerator. I can’t think of specific instances, but they’re always full of great stories.
Want to know more? Get in touch: hello@sambrodie.com
To follow the progress of the accelerator programme, follow Centrality on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram plus join our community on Centrality’s Official Telegram.
