Travala Releases Blockchain-Powered Competitor to Airbnb
Travala announced the imminent launch of a new project to be integrated on their current platform to challenge Airbnb.
Travala was founded in 2017 as a centralized booking website that lets travelers pay for hotels and flights via its native AVA token. Now, Travala offers 40 additional cryptocurrencies and has over 3 million listings. The website generates north of one million dollars in weekly revenue with around $700,000 coming from crypto.
Travala’s new decentralized, blockchain-based competitor to Airbnb will be named Dtravel, and will be launched on Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain (BSC). Dtravel is a vacation rental service that gives homeowners and renters a stake in the platform itself.
Decentralized vacation rentals
In lieu of a traditional centralized platform such as Airbnb, Tripping, and FlipKey, Dtravel hosts and guests share ownership of the platform. Users who hold the service’s TRVL token will not only share ownership, but also govern the platform. The decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) model allows for the hosts and guests to vote on important issues that include rules for operation and how community treasuries are spent.
CEO and co-founder of Travala, Juan Otero, stated that “The main goal here is that Dtravel will be focusing exclusively on homes and that homes vertical will be integrated on the Travala.com platform. Dtravel is going to be built to become a frictionless on-ramp into crypto and, just like it can become one of the largest and most decentralized DAOs in the world, it can also become one of the best use cases for crypto because travel is one of the best vehicles for crypto adoption, everybody travels, especially going into the post-covid phase.”
Dtravel was made possible by a $5 million seed fundraising round with contributions from Kenetic Capital, Future Perfect Ventures, Shima Capital, NGC Ventures, and Plutus VC, among others. Investors received tokens in exchange for funds. The new platform will complement the current services offered by Travala, which does not offer timeshare rentals.
The statement from Otero made it clear that Dtravel is a separate business model from Travala, but both will work in tandem and tackle travel together.
Dtravel will incentivize the use of cryptocurrencies on the platform from homeowners. The first 100,000 users to sign up as hosts will all share in a part of more than $35 million in TRVL coins that Dtravel will hand out.
