Tourism Promotion is being aggravated on a blockchain platform: DeskBell Chain

By NIGEL KAUA | COMMENTARY

Amongst others, the blockchain technology can offer variety for the hotel and tourism industry. It can attract and stores data on decentralization node, thus creating trust in the data created for tourism marketing while provides an ease of trading exchange of currencies. It has the potential to enter the tourism medical insurance spheres and be an aid to content sales and marketing.

Basically, blockchain is very much about moving values where it is currently popular in the banking and financial services but for tourism industry it is about handling and securing data in better ways.

DeskBell Chain project is about handling somewhat legal information in the tourism sector. From a stand point of hotels, there is a need to provide legal guarantees for working with an intermediate like an online travel agent, where each seeks to protect its interests, rather than ensure transparency and openness of the business process.

The scenario below explains; Giluwe Hotel enters an agreement with an online travel agent known as Wanol Travels, with a clause saying that for the next six months, room nights booked more than five days in advance will get a higher commission than those booked later. With today’s model, both parties would sign a contract. When the period ends, both might have run to reports to identify the total number of online bookings from Wanol Travels or they use some commission consolidation service to document it for them.

Although the process of calculating the commission takes time and effort, perhaps with a lawyer as a middlemen to rectify who also take his piece of the pie – the correct commission is eventually paid out.

What if all these were programmed into a smart contract? Well, many benefits; cost savings with removal of middlemen, time savings from cutting down business processes and the trust achieved from storing documents encrypted on a shared ledger.

DeskBell Chain is moving into this sphere, to provide the hotels a blockchain-enabled ecosystem. It allows the hotel business to develop flexible and open marketing tools.

It will also connect small medium tourism businesses (SMEs) with the tourists and guests from all-over to their point of service within a blockchain-enabled system.

The usage of geo-location technology will assist the SMEs in the remote sites with digital content creation, publishing, distribution and giving them the chance to participate in the bigger global tourism marketplace.

Researches have revealed that tourism accounts for 10% of global GDP and is crucial to driving any nation’s economy. A research published by Google Stat states that 74% of all leisure travel and 77% of all business travel is now planned on the internet. This indicates the future of travel and tourism is online.

Thus regardless of where tourism SMEs are located, they need to have online presence to succeed. For those who were on the internet, the payment process and the approach in which they sell their products and services to the potential tourists were not convincing and/or not functioning resulting in losing clients and making lost in business.

DeskBell project will help facilitate the connection between the tourists and the supplier and even facilitating the payment online for both in booking and purchasing of services and products.

In tourism, a blockchain-based marketplace can help fight against global travel scammers and bring a tourist dollar right down to the communities is a direct benefit not only to the local community but also to a nation for its economic prosperity.

Dubai is building a tourism marketplace on the blockchain platform to be launched in 2020. A travel agent in Malta, Bitcoin Adventures, accepts Bitcoin (crypto currency). A Japanese tourist was the first to travel with Bitcoin.

A Russian Tourism Official said blockchain will change the tourism industry in a huge way in about 5-10 years’ time.

Taiwan Airlines accepts Bitcoin seeing a ‘brighter future’ for tourism sector. Last year, Taiwan Central Bank supported regulating crypto currency.

Latvia’s AirBaltic become the first airline in the world to accept Bitcoin in 2014. Later a growing number of airline companies accepting crypto currency in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018.

Germany Tourism Board accepts Bitcoin.

The tourism business owners, hotels, airlines, tourists/guests, the governments and the communities are all beneficiaries to this project. It will erase the fear of being scammed, fraudulent and faking and directly provides a peer-to-peer business transaction.

It will bring back the confident and trust between the buyer and seller of the tourism products and services. It helps support the SMEs to grow and contributes to the GDP of any country’s economy.

PNG Government’s move to strive for creating digital economy and financial inclusion for its mass rural population may opt for Deskbell Chain for its tourism industry. There are about 50,000 SMEs in PNG according to the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, 14% of which are in the tourism sector.

DeskBell Chain brings the solution for PNG tourism SMEs to equally participate in the global tourism market, a breakthrough with the blockchain technology. – Via Garamut News.