Prospects For The Tourism Industry, Room Tokenization And NFT As A Means Of Paying For Lodging: An Exclusive Interview

The main innovation lies in the organization of the market around a new asset class. As part of the project, we offer the industry a tool for digitalization of hotel rooms through the issuance of NFT tokens, and provide the infrastructure to create liquidity in this market.

I have been in business for many years. And over these years, I have repeatedly encountered the inefficiency of established ways of work in a variety of areas, from finance and retail to B2B trade, logistics and production — both at the level of individual economic entities (companies) and entire industries. I wrote down this inefficiency to outdated market interaction principles, to which no real alternatives were available at that stage. Numerous intermediaries increase the complexity of any transaction, make it more expensive and also reflect negatively on the quality of final result. It always presented a concern for me. I’m very demanding towards myself and all that surrounds me — besides, I’m too emotional, so numerous imperfections in business processes which I had to put up with eventually made me upset and depressed. For a long time, I did not understand how this situation could be changed; until I delved into the study of blockchain technology in 2017 and discovered its practical possibilities, as well as underlying philosophy. After that, I started viewing the world in general and the business environment in particular with completely different eyes: I saw the possibilities of creating fundamentally different schemes of interaction between economic entities, devoid of the previous shortcomings and instead, filled up with unique advantages.

I have traveled a lot and got to know this market from many different angles. I have an insider understanding of what the existing business models are deprived of, both for tourists and managers. The answer to these challenges became GuestChain.

For the last 3 years, I have only heard that humanity is on the verge of a large-scale integration of the blockchain into everyday life. However, there are not many cases of this. How long can we wait? So I took a decision, to the best of my ability, to move from words to deeds in a single industry. I cannot say that now is the exceptional time to enter the market. The crypto winter is dragging on, interest in blockchain projects is on the decline. But a favorable moment can be anticipated for several months or years – while the concept and technology that can make revolutionary changes in the hospitality industry are already out there, so we took a decision not to wait any longer. It is clear that, at the stage of development, we will face difficulties and obstacles related, for instance, to legislative requirements and the reception of new technologies by hoteliers — but for a project that breaks new ground in the entire industry, it is nothing unusual. We will definitely overstep all challenges and move on, enhancing our product qualities and improving it for all market participants. We have a clear plan and we’re following the right path.

Our product is addressed to both businesses and tourists. On the hotel side, these are managers of any accommodation facilities who do not want to stand still, who protest against stagnation and who have enough drive to develop their enterprises and improve their financial performance. On the end of token buyers, our target audience lies at the intersection of the travel community and the crypto enthusiasts.

There is an accurate data on that. Every year, 1.2 billion people resort to the hospitality industry. This is about 15 percent of the world’s population. Currently, there are about 400 million people who are active members of the crypto community and for whom the regular use of blockchain products is the new norm. If we assume that the share of travelers among crypto-enthusiasts will be similar to that of the Earth’s population as a whole, then we secure 60 million people. And if at least 10 percent of them use our product, then the GuestChain audience will reach 6 million people this year alone. Moreover, according to experts’ forecasts, the size of our potential audience will only augment. Already next year, the number of the crypto community will come close to 500 million people, in 2025, it will exceed 570 million, and by 2030 it will surpass the 1 billion milestone. These forecasts inspire confidence that the audience of our product will grow at a similar pace.

We are not direct competitors of electronic booking systems or tour operators. Moreover, it is obvious to me that in the near future, we could build partnerships with booking systems to accept tokens issued on our platform as a mean of payment, while tour operators could leverage the GuestСhain platform to tokenize their own as well as partner’s room inventory and issue NFTs. For us, the booking functionality is a complementary product — and competition in this segment is not the crucial determinant of our success.

Users will have the ability to combine the usual booking services with our product, which will give them an exceptional chance to get better prices together with better service from hoteliers. In addition, may it be necessary, users will be able to translate the accommodation charges into a profit by selling NFTs they previously purchased on the secondary market, while simultaneously engaging in staking program and receiving a stable passive income — all of that adds up to a list of GuestСhain services that will continue to stretch the horizons of new interaction between hoteliers and tourists.

We propose a revolutionary business model for the hospitality industry, in which hoteliers have the opportunity to sell their room to end users for a long-term and get an advance payment. This will enable businesses to significantly increase the inflow of working capital, as well as maximize their financial outcomes – that’s going to be reflected on both the enhanced quality of customer service, as well as the volume of lodging offers.

The hotelier uploads data about his accommodation facility and gets access to the issuance of NFT tokens, each of which gives the right to stay in a room of a certain type during the day. The user selects a hotel, lodging unit, and acquires – immediately or over time – the required number of NFTs. After the token purchase, the funds are instantly transferred to the Hotelier. Having chosen available dates of stay, the user can now use the purchased NFTs at any time to pay the reservation fee in the corresponding hotel room. Straight after processing reservation fee, the relevant information appears in the personal account of the manager.

GCH is an internal utility token of the GuestChain platform, the possibilities of which will expand along with the development of the project. We can definitely say, it will be used to reward participation in referral and affiliate programs, as well as for NFT staking. The project provides the staking opportuntiies of the GCH itself, along with the payment of an appropriate reward. In Q3 2023, based on GCH, we will launch a loyalty program for all platform participants. More detailed information about the tokenomics of our project can be found in the White Paper GuestСhain.

While selecting a team, we, above all, looked at the applicants’ level of expertise, assessed the readiness to immerse themselves in the project and the quality of interpersonal communication. We searched for people through all channels available, including social networks and word of mouth. As a result, we were able to gather very high-caliber specialists, each of whom has a thread of past successes in realization of large startups, who deeply immersed themselves in the project and understood the nits and grits of its development. If we talk about personalities, there are more than 10 successfully implemented NFT-projects under the belt of our chief developer, which have gone from rudimentary idea to a final product. The marketing and PR is handled by a specialised crypto-marketing agency, which has been active on the market for over 5 years and has dozens of successful projects in its portfolio. The legal support of the project is taken over by a specialist with 11 years of expertise who heads his own law firm since 2018 and cooperates with partners from over 70 countries. Our project is constantly expanding with new areas of responsibility that require additional resources – in the near future, our team will be complemented by a technical director and a sales network coordinator.

We clearly follow the roadmap outlined on the GuestСhain website. At the end of February, MVP will be available to users. Currently, the main task on our team’s agenda is creation of a community of potential users for our product – so we are focusing on promoting it both among tourists and hoteliers. On top of that, we are gradually preparing to integrate the upcoming new versions of our product.

Features provided in MVP are far from the limit of our product. In its accomplished form, GuestСhain will consist of two large functional business blocks. The first is tools for digitalization and hotel room inventory through the NFT releases. The second, which I personally judge to be even more important – and the execution of which was a priority at the stage of project discussion – can provisionally be described as “tokenization of hotel real estate”. For legal and technical reasons, we decided not to include this block in the MVP, but this by no means implies that we’ll abandon it. The launch of both functional blocks will enable the final concept of GuestChain being brought to life, which is the principle of “Shared ownership and use”. Unfortunately, I can’t disclose more as of now. As soon as we fully structure our product’s image, we will be sure to share it with the community. In general, I believe that our platform will be in high demand by the travel market, and its final configuration will be determined by the users themselves, on whose active involvement in the project development I reckon.