Traveling sector insights from the Web Summit 2017

columbery (25)in #travel • 6 years ago (edited)

This week intense for Columbery. Our CEO and SMM visited Web Summit 2017 along with 60k more entrepreneurs.
In a nutshell: it was super productive. We’ve been updated with the most important news, industry trends, many partnerships ideas, and recommendations.

Blockchain for Traveling sector
This year Blockchain was the hottest topic among entrepreneurs. Tech leaders such as Joseph Lubin — Co-founder Etherium, Jon Matonis — nChain, Noelle Acheson — CoinDesk agreed: We’re just in the beginning of the Blockchain era and it’ll change most of the markers upside down.
Alex Kong from TNG FinTech Group supports our biggest concern:
We’re living in the age where anywhere we go — we’re dependent on multiple Fiats. As we travel a lot, we always pay various commissions and percentages for exchanges. Why? Blockchain wipes away this layer.
AI in traveling industry
Gillian Tans (CEO at Booking.com) discussed how AI is changing the travel industry.
People don’t want to search and plan their trips anymore. They’re ready to trust travel assistants and AI as it saves their time. Booking is already using AI but on the language level. She said that in the case when apartments provider and traveler discuss something online, thanks to AI their conversation is translated into their native languages. And these patterns start to find it’s new and new application in the traveling industry.
Partnerships ans investments
Projects connected to blockchain provokes huge interest, which is no brainer. As we’re implementing our own cryptocurrency COLUMB (CLMB), every big traveling business was interested to discuss various options of its applications.
Particularly, we have talked with Booking.com, who’ve expressed an interest in partners that are willing to provide outstanding in-city experiences. They claim that booking.com users are more interested to plan their trips and buy activities bundles from one platform.