Life Group Holdings Inc. has launched an online booking platform offering hotel reservations that will be digitized and converted into tradeable, collectible NFTs. Based on AI now servicing a large online travel agency, Life offers discounted prices on millions of hotels globally.
Life is the first platform to make large volumes of hotel bookings available for trading on secondary markets, just as baseball or Broadway tickets are today. By creating liquidity in bookings, both hotels and travelers will get more flexibility and an improved booking experience, according to the company. Users can pay via credit or debit card; crypto payments will also be accepted.
“Travel and entertainment are ripe for disruption by the blockchain,” said Eduardo (Eddie) Ibañez, scientist, Life and former chief scientist, Priceline. “It enables travel reservations and event tickets to be tokenized and traded securely and seamlessly. Hotels will welcome Life, since it helps them solve the problem of high cancellation rates by creating bookings that, for the first time ever, can be traded on secondary markets rather than canceled when travelers’ plans change.”
The Life announcement comes on the heels of the recent acquisition of blockchain technology from Velocity Ledger by Ibañez and his team. Other cofounders include Shawn Sloves, CEO, Velocity Ledger, and David Shuler, cofounder, Y2X Inc. The team works with coders in Ukraine to build out the platform.
“The business opportunity is enormous,” said Shuler. “Online travel alone is a $433 billion market today and is estimated to exceed $2 trillion by 2028. We will create tradeable assets from bookings that currently have no liquidity.”
Ibañez added, “Life is a destination marketplace offering travel and related products at prices at better rates than even the hotels can offer. Using NFTs representing stays in hotels or tickets for movies, concerts and other events, Life lets travelers showcase where they’ve been, where they are and where they’re going, while allowing them to trade those bookings on an open marketplace. Life will revolutionize and democratize travel.”
