LockChain, a company developing a technology and a marketplace for blockchain-powered booking of hotels and private property has announced in its official blog that it secured almost 100,000 hotels around the world reaching a strategic partnership with a number of companies in the accommodation sector.
This marks the first instance of decentralized technologies entering the hotel industry, which is currently estimated at around $500 billion.
The 0% commission marketplace offered by LockChain uses blockchain technology to remove intermediaries from the booking process, thus making a hotel stay cheaper for the guests. The hotels and private property owners, on the other hand, won’t have to pay considerable shares of their proceeds to centralized services like Booking.com or Airbnb, thus again making their rooms and premises more available to potential guests.
The marketplace, which is already available in alpha, will also feature an app and a browser version for end users. The transactions on the platform are executed in LOC tokens, which have already been added to several cryptocurrency exchanges, including HitBTC, Mercatox, and Etherdelta.
Aside from that, LockChain has garnered support from certain prominent public figures like Rosen Plevneliev, the former president of Bulgaria who joined the company’s advisory board.
The official announcement reads:
Through strategic partnership deals that were made, we’ve secured hotel inventory that is close to 100,000 hotels with some of the most reputable accommodation suppliers in the world. The inventory has global coverage. The prices of the hotels are extremely competitive. We’ve conducted a comparative analysis between 21 properties and the result was an average of -17% -18% pricing when compared with the most established OTA.
The announcement comes after a successful token sale in November 2017, through which LockChain raised 10,500 ETH with the total supply of 18.5m LOC tokens.
What do you think of the LockChain platform? How will it impact current hotel/accommodations booking services like Airbnb and Booking.com? Let us know in the comments below.
Images courtesy of LockChain