Welcome to gossip about gossip powered by Hadera Hashgraf. In each episode will cut through the hype of blockchain promises and explore real world examples of organizations creating the next generation of decentralized applications, which will bring trust back to the internet for assault. Hello, everyone. And welcome to the latest episode of Gossip about Gossip, the podcast where we talk about real world applications of distributed ledger technology. My name is Zenovia Godschalk, and I'm the SVP of Communications here at SwWorld Labs helping to grow the Hidera ecosystem. It is summertime, and so I'm sure on a lot of folks' minds, we have the topic of vacation and travel. And that is why I am excited to be joined today by Sauschen and Rachel from Zenny. Hey, guys. How are you? Hi. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you for having us Zana Bia. So, you know, we have a lot of folks in the community who, are familiar with Zenny, and some of them talk about Zenny as sort of the Shopify for travel. Can you explain what that means? Yeah. So Zenny, breaks through the barriers to entry, that prevent people from selling travel online. Right? So right now, there are huge technological and, regulatory and legal barriers that make it very hard for people to self travel online. So we have clients, for example, closed user group communities. So these, can be media properties, large, you know, charities, affiliations, any kind of company that has a big bespoke community that they wanna be able to offer or sell travel to. We also have travel professionals, influencers, and events who use our service to instantly launch their own travel selling site. And we offer, as part of our service access to wholesale rates, across the different kinds of travel inventory, a full built in CRM for records keeping, and, a blockchain based infrastructure that allows us to instantly settle people's commissions and the vendors' cogs. Okay. And you talked about travel communities. So I think about, you know, is it something like Wall Street Journal advertises to me? Would you like to go you know, try, wine in France or, something else. Are those the kinds of communities that you're talking about? Very similar to that. You wanna talk about attachment? Yeah. Yeah. I also wanna go back to the previous question a little bit just to give your audience here a little bit of background. I mean, the travel industry overall is still archaic, you know, and and it is in dire need of disruption. Basically, entire infrastructure is reliant on old outdated complex massive distribution channel. Okay? And involving these intermediaries and and and offering other people to launch a travel businesses on top of that is extremely complex. So when we say a Shopia Shopify for cowbell, it's not just mere word because it's like you are building in websites which are highly complex and can handle all the travel bookings, and many people can simply white label them, put the brands on. So when when when we're coming to the point to communities, it's not only the people who have same group affiliations or, things they would like to do it together, but there are major groups or employees. Think of, like, people in, in AAA who already are member there, they can simply activate travel ads and another additional, white label branded booking engine for their community were saving the funds, who were saving the money on their capital spending. So there are travel login groups. But just to clarify that. So a company like AAA or Costk Oh, right? Those sort of massive closed user groups. Right? They have membership base. They have literally billions of dollars in the bank. They can afford to build a custom booking engine. You know, they can afford to get lawyers, to get all that inventory for them, and to get all the regulatory clear, but it will cost them millions and millions of dollars to build a nice, you know, travel experience that people are from, you know, people have very high expectations. Or what it feels like to inter interact with the travel selling service online because the big, b to c travel selling services also have billions of dollars in the bank, and it shows, right, in that beautiful travel experience that you have, looking with them. So how do other organizations that are not the size costco or AAA? How do they launch an engine? How do they jump on this bandwagon? It is vastly out of their financial means to build all of this We've done it for them in a fully scalable service so everybody can have that quality of experience that they can offer to their community. And they can make it really feel sort of tailored to that group and their what they want to experience. That's customizable. Yeah. Absolutely. Yes. Correct. It's customizable. And they save money. On top of that or make money. So Yeah. And I was gonna ask, so the revenue model for them is, you know, they take sort of they offer this as a service. They take a percentage of the revenue for kind of organizing the trips or the experiences. Correct. We make money by charging a subscription, and we also, get a base level of commission on the travel that sold, you know, through our system. However, these travel resellers, they are in a larger commission than we do. Right? They bring the travelers to that site. They supply them with the inventory we've given them, and then they earn a commission on the travel that gets sold. Or, you know, let's say it's a corporate and they're just trying to save money, they just get that discount. Great. And, you know, I think it begs the question. So why do you need blockchain as part of this solution? Absolutely. I'll let Sasha talk about that. Yes. So as I was I was, trying to try to put a focus on the massive complexities involved on on the end of the travel infrastructure. So it root cause the entire agency in travel is data, payments, and time of payment settlement. For example, if you go and make a travel booking in a large OTA and then a recent example was COVID, you go on and made a booking there. And now that money moves from that online travel agency to the middle man who is a consolidator supplier and then supply and send it to whether it's hotels or airlines. So there are multiple men or men involved in every time a booking is made online. So there are three to four counterparties. So every time money and data exchanges, there is delay in settlement. There is loss of record. There is miscommunication. A massive, massive, inefficient, inefficiency in the entire ecosystem. And there's also no real source of truth. Every one of those counterparties is using their own centralized database. And they don't even use the same booking ID for the same transaction. So the set a single transaction can have four or five different identification numbers, which leads to an utter nightmare in reconciliation. And Yeah. I think we've all experienced that. Right? Absolutely. One of the most interesting data points that we learned is that in forty percent of transaction, the commission that's owed to the travel seller goes unpaid. Or is it merely delayed? Yeah. So this is a ginormous problem in the industry. Yeah. So either small guy gets hurt or, big guy in the room consolidates all the money and then set it at will to whoever the final parties are to be received. So it's that's another bigger bigger problem. So it's not equitable to all the participants in the ecosystem. So that's one of the major reason as the April said, everything is in centralized system. Everybody generates their own booking code imagine post COVID airlines could not return the money back on the credit card. The only thing they could do is they could give you the credit. For future travel. Every single travel, like, you don't want to travel. Maybe you never want to travel. Three years, you're gonna, like, that credit was a very complex situation. So they're sitting on your money for a few years and and you are waiting to take that travel trip. So what Zenny has built? Zenny built entire travel infrastructure on a decentralized nation. You know why we're here. We built it on Huddl as well. So every time any Zennie powered site or let's call it hider travel dot com, you go on that, If customer makes a booking, that booking is attached to a DLT ledger. Every all the data is logged on main net. And all of the payments is also attached to that particular transaction. So we have transaction hash It's all attached to that. Every time money on data moves, all of the participants get the notification. Their wallet has already occurred. Everybody has a single source of truth in terms of that transaction, when it happened, what time it was happened, whether the booking was refundable, not refundable. If booking is refundable, customers simply need to hit cancel, money goes back in his bank account. If it's not refundable, all the parties get settled instantly by redeeming the booking. So it's simple and and it it's very cost efficient, because of the internal network because all the fees gaseous are pegged to the dollars. Very important aspect. And so it's working in the back end. The end user does not need to have a web three wallet or any of those sort of obstacles that we've seen to broader adoption of some of these technologies. Yeah. That was one of our biggest going in is that nobody needed to learn about blockchain to benefit from blockchain. I like that contrast. Yeah. Yes. We made it so web too friendly that there is no web three angle to it. You see dollar to dollar. You don't feel like a coin or token who is going up and down in value, you see a very clear value proposition on every single aspect of that transaction. We did our ecosystem. And you talked Sushin a little bit about, you know, the way that the fees are denominated on Hadera. Was that the sort of the selling point in terms of using Jira as your ledger or were there other things that compelled you? There were three major factors. One, when we started looking for, a blockchain which could, solve our use case and support the volume we would about to hit. So transaction per second was one. Gas space was another. And also we were a very environmentally conscious company. Recently, we all have seen the white files in Canada and all the smoke we thought we would wanna choose a blockchain, which is, eco friendly, you know. Yeah. And can you share with us a little bit about what the development process is been like. You know, I think we a lot of times we talk to sort of web three native apps and, you know, it is just they they sort of start from scratch and everything is, you know, is web three native. This, I think, is really interesting, you know, as you're I would imagine you have developers of all sort of different flavors and and thinking about different parts of the application. How was it integrating Hadera into the application? Well, a good question. So a great community, by the way. Such an amazing support we received from the entire community. It was very easy to find the technology tech stack is fairly, easily, you can find the resource to build the tech, right? Our use case had a lot of complexities involved in terms of the infrastructure is web two. All of the mechanics is on web two and we have to either parallel bill or mimic what is on the web two and web three and and transact all of that data and they communicate seamlessly from each other. It took us, I guess, from vision to design to inception almost twelve months, Rachel. I imagine twelve to fourteen months. We we started, yeah, meaningfully building. Yeah. It took us nearly a year and a half. To get everything. Three months. Right. Yeah. And this is a this is a robust highly scalable application. Right? You're not gonna toss us out there in a few months. If that's that's the and and we're and we're glad that it took so long because if it wasn't so hard to build, everybody would just build it. And also, you need to have all the infrastructure to build on top of it. So both and in hand. And so as you all think about, you know, you're you're sort of, you're now engaging with these communities. I'm sure you're hearing feedback from them on, okay, this is great. And now, you know, I think I could also use x, y, and z. What do you see for your roadmap going forward? We have two major major things that we think where we think that the web three element of this product is going to be massively differentiating even on top of the instant settlement of commissions, which is a huge value add to to people in our community. But, we are working on blockchain based rewards and NFTs. So so bookable travel that can be converted to transferable n f t's. Very exciting. And, you know, I think I feel like frequent travelers also sort of want to demonstrate all the places that they have gone. You know, I was a little bit sad. My last trip, they didn't they I didn't get the physical stamp at one of the places on the passport, right? Because it was I mean, they're like, it's all electronic. Just go. But, you know, I But this is very different. That's right. Because what NFTs have been to date is art. Right? It has been a a commemorative stamp. It has been a picture. This isn't what we're talking about. We're talking about buying a hotel room that you can then sell on an exchange as an NFT. Right? So it's a contract. This is a totally totally different application. Of this technique because at at the at its core, that is what NFTs are. Right? It's an ownership contract. And so you wanna talk about it, Adjane? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Zenobi, I imagine you booked a hotel in Hawaii, for the new years, and you spent like ten grand and it's not refundable booking. And if you didn't buy any travel insurance, and unfortunately, you have to cancel your trip, change in plans, you have to forfeit all ten thousand dollars. Worth of travel. And, Hotel is expecting you and trying to make money and blocking the room for you because it's not even labeled. You're not gonna go ahead and cancel you just gotta keep it just in case. So they both are losing. You know what I mean? They're losing opportunity to business. So Once you convert your booking into entity, if you happen to book that, a white booking on Zenny platform, you just convert that booking into NFT, how that whole thing became transferable, tradable, and booking can be modified to someone who is willing to go to Hawaii. During that period of time. Maybe it's one room, two adults, and somebody's looking for exact same thing. And and the prices might have gone up than the from the time you have booked. So now you either sell it at higher price or cut your losses and just give it to somebody. And usually, you wouldn't sell it at price if this time is passed from the day you booked and what the price is today is. So the very nature of having this fluid travel demand and supply met through the unique NFP marketplace or pool is is is what we're bringing to the We have more than eight hundred airlines. Two million hotels integrated, more than three hundred thousand car rental locations that have living on any four hundred thousand activities worldwide. It's it's a massive, thing we have built and we have we're bringing cruises on scene. So just to give you, it's like a game changer for a web to economy because now every booking, you can actually convert into entity and resell it. Yeah. We had an interesting experience, Gatwick Airport shut down the other night. They had air traffic control had a glitch. Nothing could come in. Nothing could go out. We were stuck. We could not get to Gatwick. Our hotel was not refundable at Gatwick. You know, we tried to call. They said, sorry, you're gonna have to get through to the local desk. I'm sure the local desk was very busy because they had a bunch of people now stuck at Gatwick who couldn't get a hotel. And I couldn't get through to them to tell them I'm not going to be there. So, I mean, this is a, you know, this is spot on in terms of as you hear sort of the summer challenges of travel and people getting stuck. And, you know, there were whole plane fulls of people who now were at Gatwick overnight, who had no place to stay and the ability to do that, and the hotel not have to worry about it. Right? They can't give you a refund because they don't know if they'll be able to rebook it, but certainly if you do it direct, that takes a lot of the hassle out of their side too. No. Absolutely. But let me let me correct, a little bit. On on the direct. So direct side is that's a phase one is we have settlements we have integrated. Through them, we have all the connections. Directs is the next step we will be having it. But this, they are the conduit at this moment. You know, and soon soon. Like, literally that's our goal turn on direct as soon as possible because it just this creates a very simple flow of, system. But and I just want to go back to the payment side which is already live. Yeah. Go ahead, Rachel. Don't wanna overstate the simplicity of this. This is a this is gonna be a big undertaking, especially you brought up flights. You know, flights have a lot of regulatory issues. There's, you know, do not fly lists. There's you know what I mean? So we're we are not naively saying, oh, this will be so simple to do that. We have a flight partner who is excited to work with us to try to develop this functionality, but it's, you know, this is not a simple thing. Long long way. Yep. Gonna be it. It's gonna be a And then first activity would come in the hotels, not not flight. That's the -- Yeah. -- that's the first product market we'll see and then everything else will start slowly slowly based on an option based on also the winning partners on the other side who allow us to to make it transferable because they it's an ancillary income they never had in the past that's possible carried all the industry to get go this way, you know. Right. And there was I mean, there's literally today. I think there's no there's no solution. Right? And there is this is a huge problem. So, yes, having just lived that nightmare, this is very exciting. Yeah. We we look forward to a future where that all exists. Amazing. Well, I have taken quite a bit of your time today. Is there anything else you'd like to share with our community before we wrap up, or if they wanna engage, you know, and and learn about this, where should we send them? They should please come visit us at w w w dot zenney dot com. That's x e n I dot com, and they can learn all about us. And certainly feel free to reach out to us, you know, directly from there. Sachin Rachel, thank you so much for joining us, and please keep us posted on your progress. Thank you so much. Thank you
