LockTrip Successfully Deploys 521,000 Properties!
We are extremely happy to announce that the total combined inventory at the LockTrip marketplace now surpasses 521,000 properties (yes, this is roughly 121,000 more than initially promised). The reason for the “bonus inventory” lies in our decision to be conservative in our estimation prior to validating the actual number on the combined production database.
The hotels are deployed and ready to be booked on our https://beta.locktrip.com marketplace.
In addition to the enhanced inventory, we upgraded our marketplace with some game-changing improvements:
- intelligent search by individual hotel name — the auto-suggestion tool will detect when you are trying to search for an individual hotel and will pull the results with the specific hotel highlighted on top
- enhanced geo-search — you can now search for much more accurate locations (including villages and areas)
- completely rebuilt search algorithm — reduces search time by up to 70% compared to the previous version
- rebuilt architecture governing the entire chain of events that are executed in parallel to the booking — this will improve the success rate of bookings above the current ≈ 95%
- a new experimental feature that will display the “Last best Price” for hotels while the search is being processed in the background — This will result in an instant display of the last known price of a given hotel whenever a user initiates a search (please note that the feature is still experimental as we are fine tuning it). We will be conducting a survey among our members to make the final decision whether to keep it or not.
To further elaborate what this feature will do:
1. A user initiates a search for a city with e.g. a total of 100 hotels. Our providers return prices for 80 of these 100. These prices are then stored in our dedicated “Last Best Price” database.
2. A different user searches for the same city (different dates). In that case we instantly show results with “Last Best Price” and at the same time will pull real-time pricing and availability as a background process within few seconds. Once the real-time prices are processed, they will update the search results as well as the “Last Best Price” database for the next user. If a user clicks on a hotel from within the results prior to waiting for the real-time price to be fetched, as soon as he opens the hotel page, he will be displayed the real-time price for that particular hotel.
- Lightning fast hotel page and checkout experience — hotel detail page now loads up to 80% faster than before. So are all other pages throughout the checkout process.
- Room level mapping in backend — we’ve integrated the first layer of our room level mapping which results in a much bigger set of combination of rooms as available options to choose from (up to 100 combinations for a hotel of bigger size)
This update is one among four planned which are part of our upcoming “LockTrip 1.0” mini road-map, as preparation for LockTrip’s retail-ready production version. Once we finalize the 4 updates, we will be switching off the beta.locktrip.com and will be deploying the marketplace on our official root domain https://locktrip.com. That will also be the moment when growing our bookings would be becoming a high priority.
The “LockTrip 1.0” mini road-map consists of:
1. Deployment of the new inventory, enhanced search performance, hotel name search & Geo-specific search— this has been completed just now
2. New Design/UI deployment — this is scheduled for deployment within the next 1–2 months
3. LockTrip’s Token Economy Upgrade — another positive surprise that was developed based on the gathered data from actual marketplace usage, volatility, and token circulation that will benefit the long term value of the LOC economy. We made hundreds of simulations and will be sharing with you some of our key findings in a dedicated community discussion.
4. BTC & ETH Payment methods — enabling flagman crypto payments by default as well as starting the integration of additional cryptocurrencies and tokens afterwards
We want to express our gratitude to our amazing LockTrip community for its tremendous support and loyalty despite the fact that we had delayed this vital milestone. Despite the delay, we managed to deliver 100% of the milestones so far and we are committed to following our trajectory.
We also managed to make up for some of the delays by advancing at a quicker pace with the new design/UI work. We have already completed our design quality assurance (QA) and are working on the front-end integration with our existing backend. We expect the production version to be deployed within the next 1–2 months. What is more important is that the new design will be extremely polished as we are literally looking into every single pixel to make sure it is as amazing as we want it to be.
Looking at how far we’ve achieved together is truly amazing. A big thank you from our whole team for giving us the opportunity to build through your contribution and learn from your continuous input.
LockTrip is the first marketplace with 0% commission where you can save on average 20% on your hotel and rental bookings compared to anywhere else. Read how to buy LOC tokens here!
