About
Hotelier Coin seamlessly connects travelers, hotels, service providers, and technology solutions in one ecosystem where everyone benefits. Through the power of blockchain technology, The Borderless Currency cuts out middlemen and gives the savings back to the community.
Hotelier Mart is a hotel booking and trading platform that features over 170K hotels in 185 countries and 5k cities around the world and counting. It blends the latest technology, the power of blockchain, and an experience-centric approach to offer travelers and hoteliers multiple benefits and countless features; including car rentals and airlines, verified hotel reviews, KYC compliance, blockchain-protected data, and dedicated local Experience Ambassadors.
HDEX: With the Hotelier Coin Decentralized Exchange, hotel rooms can be traded as a commodity for the first time in history. Through our HDEX, Room nights are exchanged through a unique ask & bid process, where tokens can be bought in bulk with no restrictions and no middlemen.
By offering a decentralized trading platform, a booking platform, hotel services, and payment processing, our platform is a 360° end-to-end solution that is designed to benefit everyone.
Our Story
Rana Mukherji is a hotelier at heart.
He has been managing, operating and running luxury hotels across the Middle East, India, North America, and Africa for nearly two decades. He’s worked with Marriott, Regent-Carlson, Fairmont, Raffles Hotels & Resorts, Bespoke Hotels U.K, and most recently was a general manager for IFA Hotel Investments.
During a trip to the Mediterranean in 2016, the inspiration came to create his own boutique hotel company. While performing market research for his new venture, he would travel to London, Italy, Malta, Croatia, and Montenegro to meet with several hotel owners to discuss their day-to-day business challenges.
While eager to start his own hotel company, he discovered many of the owners wanted to sell off their business. The sinking profitability due to exorbitant booking fees were siphoning the hotels’ revenue, forcing them to reduce their staff and cut costs in order to stay afloat.
As a result, they were left struggling to manage all the moving parts in their business and couldn’t meet the increasing demand for innovative new tech solutions. These hotels were losing traction in their market and their online visibility was diminishing by the day.
That’s when Rana was exposed to the blockchain and inspiration struck.
Right away, he realized the technology could solve many of the hospitality industries major pain points, both for the traveler and the hotel owner. He knew that a decentralized currency could cut out the middlemen plaguing the industry and empower it to flourish.
From that moment on, his mission in life has been to leverage innovative new technology to create a travel ecosystem that benefits everyone — from the traveling salesman, to the stand-alone hotel owner, to the savvy investor.
The Future
Imagine a new reality where a hotel lives up to the description and reviews.
Where your interests, wishes, and requirements are shared before your arrival. Where all your preferences and data are securely stored in the blockchain and is updated with every visit.
A new reality where you no longer need to spend time searching, reading reviews, and looking for reliable information. A reality where all these intricate processes become effortless, even automatic.
What if a hotel knew whether you liked a glass of red wine, knew your preference for a particular beer, or knew what you liked to have for breakfast — all without ever having to talk to them.
What if you didn’t have to pay 3rd parties for the privilege of traveling, but were instead rewarded for booking hotels. What if you received cashback every time you made a purchase and got free room nights for your loyalty.
Well, with Hotelier Coin all that is possible and much, much more.
The Problem
Did you know that most hotel booking websites are just a subsidiary of the most popular online travel agencies?
If you dig deeper, you’ll find that the market is monopolized.
There is no real choice and the apparent variety is just a mere illusion. The sad truth is that a small number of global companies dominate almost the entire travel services market.
Such intermediaries are not only a barrier to entry for small hotel owners & companies, they also create huge price hikes for travelers. Due to a lack of competition, travel giants such as Priceline and Expedia retain complete control over the industry — inflating hotel room prices by as much as 30% due to their exorbitant commissions.
Add this to high bank processing fees, and you have travelers paying almost a third of their budget to middlemen, and hotels are left to fight over scraps.
Figures from the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO), estimate that the number of international tourist arrivals worldwide is going to continue steadily increasing, reaching 1.8 billion by 2030. In 2017, global travel industry gross bookings reached $1.6 trillion, data from Deloitte shows.
Yet, while the industry is booming, it is the established online travel agencies and branded hotels that conquer. Last year Expedia’s annual revenue reached $10.6 billion. While Expedia and Priceline both provide robust access to a large number of clients, their high booking fees gouge hotels and hurt small hotel owners ability to compete.
After all the greedy middlemen in the travel industry take their cut, only a small percentage of the revenue is left for the hotelier. This not only hurts hotels, it also trickles down into the guest-experience by forcing hoteliers into cost-cutting measures.
- Industry Inefficiencies: The travel industry is weighed down by redundant steps, superfluous channels, and complex platforms that result in a disjointed structure, higher costs, and lack of flexibility. Endless middlemen make the simplest processes expensive and time-consuming.
- High Costs: Bank fees, credit charges, FOREX commissions, middlemen, and convoluted procedures are just some of the factors that dramatically increase costs for travelers and limit profits for hotels.
- No Transparency: Fraudulent reviews, positive or negative, undermine travelers’ trust and experience, affect hotels’ reputation, and turn a process that should be entirely transparent into a hit-and-miss scenario.
- Lackluster Experience: Despite the obvious benefit for hotels and travelers, the industry lacks a comprehensive loyalty program that rewards travelers. Travelers also have no way to personalize their experience and are not in control of their own data.
- Security Vulnerabilities: Because travelers’ data is spread across multiple agencies, it is often left unencrypted and stored on public databases, leaving your personal information vulnerable to security breaches and leaks.
- Legacy Procedures: Inbound Tour Operators (ITO) charge around 30% HR costs for B2B bulk room nights sale, and come with complicated legacy contract signing procedures — many have 30–120 days payment terms for bulk inventory, which can hurt hotels cash flow and risk supplier default.
- Outdated Technology: Nearly 80% of activity providers are not bookable online, the industry has yet to embrace the $200B+ cryptocurrency market, it continues to struggle to engage Millennials, and it does not leverage the power of the Blockchain and smart contracts to secure information, reduce costs, and simplify operations.
The Solution
The blockchain & smart contracts are at the heart of our platform and enable the tokenization of the hotel business. This means that the management and storage of room inventory can now become entirely digital.
Blockchain technology enables a simple room booking process while smart contracts eliminate the need for intermediaries, which reduces costs, increases security, and improves efficiency.
Payments, terms, and last-minute changes can all be addressed with smart contracts, securing the interests of all parties. And KYC verification eliminates fraud and fake reviews, ensuring all participants are protected.
Hotelier Coin offers a world of possibilities to businesses that cannot afford the high fees of leading online travel agencies. Finally, small and medium-sized hotels have an opportunity to compete and thrive.
- Full Transparency: The network is decentralized, the code is open-source, and all reviews/transactions are verified by the blockchain.
- Save Money: Book the lowest possible price by cutting out banks, payment processors, and other middlemen.
- Earn Rewards: Hotels and guests each receive 4% cashback on every transaction and have access to enhanced loyalty programs.
- Better Experience: Preference profiles give travelers total control over their data and experience.
- More Flexibility: Hotels can be bought & sold as a commodity for the first time, and purchased tokens can be resold in one click.
- Enhanced Security: Agreements are protected by smart contracts and data is secured by the blockchain.
- More Accessibility: Small and medium-sized hotels now have access to technology and a platform where they can compete with established brands.
How It Works
The Technology
Blockchain technology fundamentally changes the way transactions are made and how digital information is stored, processed, and accessed.
In its simplest form, the blockchain is just a database of information where ‘blocks’ are recorded in a public ledger.
While private data is encrypted, everyone in the chain can see and verify each transaction. This creates a traceable, decentralized system that resists third-party modification and manipulations, while providing transparency for all data that is stored.
The Platform
When travelers book using the Hotelier Mart platform, their wishes and preferences will be entered into a single encrypted database, synchronized by blockchain technology. This data is then passed along to hoteliers, resulting in a highly personalized experience.
All users have access to an HTL-Stable Euro, debit cards, and individual fintech wallets and bank accounts. Fraud is eliminated through a careful KYC authentication process, which verifies that all hotel reviews and transactions are real.
The platform will provide an opportunity for users to participate in bidding processes protected by smart contracts. After verification, each user can easily book or even trade a hotel room by using the primary token of the platform (Hoteliercoin), which can be purchased at any time through the internal integrated exchange.
The built-in filter allows users to select a hotel according to criteria such as brand, location, activities, and interests to help them find the most suitable room option.
The Exchange
Listing tokens on large exchanges is often expensive and impractical, as high barriers to entry often prevent start-ups from entering the industry.
The decentralized financial system offered by Hotelier Coin allows any hotel owner the opportunity to tokenize a percentage of their rooms and reap the many benefits of integrating their business with the blockchain.
The HDEX will enable the sale and purchase of both Hoteliercoin tokens and the digital assets of other HTL-tokenized hotels. The implementation of a decentralized crypto-exchange will take place on the Ethereum blockchain and the source code will be open to the public, so that anyone can check it.
The Hotelier Exchange will provide a guaranteed opportunity to sell/purchase hotel tokens at any time. One of the main advantages is the guaranteed reserve, hotel owners will be able to auto-buy tokens from the exchange at the best price if all their tokens are sold out. The HDEX will enable the sale and purchase of both Hoteliercoin tokens and the digital assets of other tokenized hotels.
Digital asset owners who want to sell or purchase will only need to enter the number and price in the respective currency pair and sign the transaction. The details then go to the blockchain, get into the list of orders, and the specified number of tokens are frozen until order execution or cancellation. During the transaction, the exchange commission is 0.1%.
The Currency
The Hoteliercoin token will function as the currency for round-the-clock booking and sale of hotel rooms, allowing Hotelier Coin to cut out banks and other financial intermediaries. As a result, fees and commissions will be minimized — reducing prices for travelers and increasing profits for hotels.
Hoteliercoin is an ERC-20 utility token built with cryptoeconomics in mind, and is designed from the core to be demand-driven & growth-centric. It is a stable coin that’s tied to the Euro (1 HTL = 1.2 USD) and the price of the token is based on a defined need and a tangible source of demand for goods & services.
Because Hoteliercoin tokens eliminate the need for intermediaries and reduce commissions in the travel industry, Hotelier Coin has a clear road to popularization, widespread adoption, and a steady increase in demand.
The Ecosystem
For Travelers
Our platform seeks to give travelers peace of mind because when you book with Hotelier Mart you know that:
- You’re getting the lowest price
- All reviews are verified and real
- Your personal data is secure
- You’re rewarded for booking
And while the blockchain is central to the platform, travelers do not need to understand the technology to benefit.
Through Hotelier Mart, the process of buying Hoteliercoin tokens happens automatically and behind-the-scenes to promote maximum simplicity and usability — even for those who have never used cryptocurrency.
With our DApp, travelers also have access to an enhanced experience with a straightforward booking system that generates preference profiling. The hotel operator can now understand guests with unique insights provided by the platform, allowing for a more personalized, customizable experience.
Lastly, travelers now have access to a comprehensive loyalty system that rewards them for booking and gives them 4% cashback on every purchase.
For Hotels
Our mission is to give hotel owners complete control over their hotel rooms, a highly perishable commodity that can be sold as high as $1,000 a night, or as low as $0 if it’s not used.
Through the sale of room night tokens in advance, hotels can improve their cash flow and revenue per available room. In addition, we will also improve sales productivity with smart contracts and ask-bid options, avoiding sales lobby and legacy negotiation — a win-win for both B2B and B2C.
Hotels can store their funds in their digital wallet or convert them to Hoteliercoin, HTL-Stable Euro or fiat currency via the preferred payment gateway. Hotel owners can also choose the most suitable option for the sale of rooms, independently determining the accepted currency for payment.
At any given time, the hotel can sell up to 20% of its room inventory through the platform’s exchange with an unlimited term. The 20% room cap in supply will secure the hotel room night token’s price in the secondary marketplace against demand. The commission on both sides is 0.1%.
However, the platform expands beyond just payment processing and data management.
Hotelier Mart also offers hotels access to back-end tech solutions, integrated cloud-based solutions, and a cutting-edge booking system that enables verified reviews and preference profiling for as little as $5/bedroom per month.
Read More:
Visit Our Websites:
- Hotelier Coin: Follow our progress.
- Hotelier Mart: Browse our booking platform.
See Our Press:
- Forbes Interview: Read the article.
- Bitcoin Magazine Interview: Watch the video.
- Bench Impact Interview: Listen to the podcast.
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Read Our Press Releases:
