Your Questions on Blockchain in Travel Answered Live
On November 1 we had a Live QA session on Blockhain in Travel and the first decentralized travel distribution platform. Our community submitted questions and Winding Tree team answered live during our special edition event via Telegram. The live session was projected on the big screen during the event — lots of fun!
As promised, here is a full recap of the QA
Q: Out of all the travel segments, car travel, air travel, boat travel, hotels, sharing economy etc. Which one will be most affected by the use of blockchain? Where do you see it benefiting the most?
A: In the short-term, hotels and vacation rentals. That’s also why we’re focusing on hotels first. They have static inventory which doesn’t move (compared to airplanes which can be switched last second to increase capacity and don’t operate the same route).
That makes it easier for scalability terms and managing the inventory on the blockchain.
Q: Any major partners/use cases for Blockchain in Travel? (who’s doing anything major in travel/blockchain right now)
Q: What about non Blockchain-savvy users — suppliers and travelers?
A: The main reason we’re focusing on B2B adoption is becuase it’s a very small minority of people who are blockchain-savvy. With a B2B implementations end consumers don’t even have to know that their booking is being processed through Winding Tree! Blockchain-savvy users can book directly through the blockchain.
Q: Will anyone get access to the inventory and what are transaction costs?
A: Yes, the inventory will be public, the transaction cost to book the inventory will be cents of dollar. Lets say that you want to create a hotel with three different room types and 90 rooms it will cost you ~100 USD in fees to upload everything
Q: How WT plans to overcome performance issues inherent with current Blockchain platforms?
A: Great question, today at Devcon I heard about a lot of different solutions for scalability, at the beginning we will focus on state channels. We have been talking with zeppelin-solidity about collaboration in state channels development. So state channels is our first solution, but maybe we wont even need it in a future with proof of stake, sharding and plasma.
Follow up Q: What is the word at DevCon about these issues? What is the conclusion? Are people from Lightning/Raiden there?
I mean, obviously Vitalik will push for Plasma, Gavin — for Polka Dot
Follow up A: So seems that sharding, proof of stake and plasma will be the final solution for scalability, but it will take time, years to see it possible
Joseph Poon, (one of the creators of lighting network in bitcoin) is supporting Plasma alongside with vitalik.
Q: Will blockchain have an effect on platforms with open API’s?
A: Yes it will, enabling +++collaboration and management of releases in more decentralized way.
Q: How WT will help with payments from travelers to vendors and payments overseas?
A: If you look at a typical flight from the US to Europe it can undergo several FX transactions. I.e. if there is a stopover in Iceland the payment wil be done in USD and FXed into EUR and ISK. But then the airlines will have to pay taxes and fees in the the foreign airport too, so they’ll have to FX the money back into USD/EUR/ISK. With Lif the process can be simplified by every party having to only FX what they need and not bear the cost of everyone inbetween.
Q: We’d like to list our inventory on Winding Tree platform as an early phase test, what would that entail?
A: You will need an ethereum account with ETH and LIF, integrate one of our tools in your system and start uploading inventory, if you want to integrate WT with other channels your choice will be the Nodejs API at the beginning.
And of course educate yourself before about the smart contracts that you can use, we will provide a set of smart contracts trying to support different use cases. You will have an entire community to help you and documentation of course :)
Follow up A: Many people ask us about the biggest challenge that we’re facing. And it is education about the blockchain technology, or rather lack of it.
- if you don’t own any crypto, the best starting point is to get some, $10–20 worth of Bitcoin is enough
- if you hold your tokens on an exchange, you don’t understand the point behind the technology. Transfer them to your own wallet: Mycelium, Copay, MyEtherWallet, etc.
2a) for advanced users — get a hardware wallet, like Trezor or Ledger
Q: How Blockchain can apply to risk management in Travel?
A: While we’re focusing on distribution, there are several advantages. We’ve been talking to companies which provide hotels with smart lock technology. With that you can authenticate guest arrivals at hotels etc. as the guest’s smartphone or other smart device needs to be present. This can be replicated in vacation rentlas, airline, etc. with beacons / low-energy bluetooth. Any centralized solution can be hacked / malfunction. Smart contracts on a decentralized network don’t.
Q: We are starting a new OTA and wanted to find out how we can connect to WT platform?
A: You can start consuming and getting all inventory directly form WT, for now everything will be on blokchain and it will expensive to read it but after the MVP we plan to have an exact copy of the WT platform offchain (like in a MySQL or MONGO database), where you will be able only to execute read operations. If you want to make any change or booking you will have to do it onchain, communicating directly with the blokchain
Q: How Líf tokens can be used?
A: If you are a hotel to upload and edit your inventory on chain.
If you are a travel company or user you can use it to make bookings.
LifToken will be used by default in all of WT contracts, and we will have all kind of smart contracts for it, lets say, contracts to have a spacial price between a hotel and another travel company that act as reseller.
Q: What about non Blockchain-savvy users — suppliers and travelers?
A: The integration with WT will much easier/faster that other other providers. It will be plenty of documentation for it and it will depend on how deep you want to go with WT, if you want to write your own smart contract that will use LifToken and add extra rules and functions to the ones taht WT provides you will need to do more research for sure, but again, here we have the community, documentation, you ar enot the only one that will have problems integrating, thats why we will provide a lot of documentation and help on integration :)
Q: Can you roundup some comparison between decentralized travel distribution platform and conventional GDSs?
A: 1) decentralized platform prevent creation of monopolies. Every centralized solution WILL try to be a monopoly.
2) trusted third parties (which all the Facebooks and Amadeuses of the world are) are prone to two things: a) going down (look at Amadeus malfunction a month ago, when Marina was stranded in Riga), b) bad actors — inside or outside the company
Decentralized solutions prevent these problems. Bottom line: centralized companies only care about their own good, decentralized — about the success of the industry as a whole.
Q: why the name “Winding Tree”?
Follow up Q: Im sure everyone wants to know why such a cool name.
A: Haha. This is a good one. It has many meanings and explanations:
1) a tree is a good symbol in all human cultures
2) there is a data structure in computer science called a “tree”
3) a tree connects two different realms, in our case — buyers and sellers
You should have asked about Líf as well, which is even cooler
Follow up Q: why Lif ???
A: For the sake of the project, Líf is a funny way to spell “leaf”, right?
But check this out: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Líf_and_Lífþrasir
Basically, Líf is also “life”.
The energy substance of the tree, of the platform.
Logical and Sexy.
Any more questions?
Phew, that was a REALLY fun session, fully live & during an actual event with Telegram projected on a big screen. Thank you everyone who submitted their questions and thank you, Winding Tree team for all the good answers. To get more of your questions answered or to jump into discussion — join Telegram chat or have a 1:1 Office Hours session with Winding Tree.
