Travala’s claims to repair broken relationship between hosts and guests created by existing centralized home-sharing platforms could be a glimmer of hope to Airbnb users.
Travala.com a pro-crypto travel agency is releasing a decentralized property rental service to help its users get seamless payment transactions.
As earlier reported in Travala’s Wednesday announcement, they formed a partnership with former executives of Airbnb, Expedia, and other companies to launch Dtravel.
Dtravel is a decentralized vacation rental platform that may serve as a timeless competitor for rental sites like Airbnb and Vrbo.
The platform is community governed through Dtravel’s Decentralized Autonomous Organization, or DAO, and uses DeFi to facilitate smart contracts between hosts and guests.
The launch statement of Dtravel promised to mend broken relationship between hosts and guests created by existing centralized home-sharing platforms.
They however reiterated that issues stemming from centralized control on competing home-sharing platforms have led to high fees and an inadequacy of direct communications between hosts and guests. This is in addition to many not permitting the use of cryptocurrency as a payment option.
According to the statement made by Travala co-founder and CEO Juan Otero, “traditional home sharing platforms are aligned with their users in the early stages, however, over time it changes.”
As the need to return dividends to shareholders increases, home-sharing platforms are forced to withdraw as much as possible from transactions on their platforms.”
Airbnb and related platforms have been criticized by several people for higher-ups
rarely — if ever — changing policies in response to customer feedback.
Airbnb for instance, decided to issue many refunds to guests for cancellations with a unipartite system at the beginning of the pandemic last year, this however did not provide a means for guests who pulled out prior to a certain date to receive compensation.
This unilateral move led to a massive public outcry from many Airbnb hosts and guests.
Dtravel’s TRVL token can be used by visitors to the site to pay for stays and participate in platform governance. Not just that, the token can also be used for staking to qualify for certain rewards.
Dtravel has pledged to distribute $35 million worth of the token — on the Binance Smart Chain and the Ethereum Network — to the first 100,000 hosts to register on the platform.
Once vaccinated U.S. residents are able to enter other countries without a 14-day quarantine, while the launch of the booking platform follows.
Interestingly, some countries in Europe have opened up to U.S. travelers, as airlines are allegedly preparing for an air travel spike this summer.
In May, Travala over 183,000 monthly active users. In addition to this, over 70% of all bookings made in that same month were paid for using cryptocurrencies.
Dtravel is backed by a $5 million seed round from Kenetic Capital, Future Perfect Ventures, DHVC, Plutus VC, GBV Capital, AU21 Capital, Shima Capital, LD Capital and NGC Ventures, and several angel investors.
A $5 million seed round from Kenetic Capital, Future Perfect Ventures, DHVC, Plutus VC, GBV Capital, AU21 Capital, Shima Capital, LD Capital and NGC Ventures, and several angel investors backs up Dtravel.
