NFTs help to preserve Bali’s culture and artisans
Craftsmen in Bali are among 11 artisans from Indonesia who are helping to protect the country’s heritage and culture by placing their work on Web3, a web feature that includes blockchain technology.
A BBC report reveals the artisans have joined with Quantum Temple, a Web3 platform designed to preserve cultural heritage and artisan skills for future generations.
Quantum Temple markets itself as a “decentralised web3 platform that preserves ancestral wisdom”.
Quantum Temple founder Linda Adami travelled around Bali during the Covid pandemic and saw first-hand its devastating impact on the livelihoods of the islanders.
Adami’s background in blockchain enabled her to grasp how Web3 could connect artisans in Bali to a new audience and give them a way to earn a regenerative income.
Subsequently, Indonesia’s Ministry of Tourism has created Paths to Alangö, a collection of NFTs, one-of-a-kind digital assets that are sold through Web3.
By offering their works as NFTs, artisans will also receive a percentage of any secondary sales.
Source: BBC
Travel bloggers offered help with anxiety
More evidence this week that the life of the global travel blogger/influencer is not quite all it’s cracked up to be.
‘Blogxiety’ is a term coined to describe the burnout travel bloggers experience when they run out of content ideas.
A survey of 1,000 travel bloggers by travel partnership platform Travelpayouts found that 32% of them have thought about changing their career and more than half have experienced burnout.
Travelpayouts, which connects more than 300,000 travel content creators with over 100 leading travel brands, has now organised an online ‘Blogxiety retreat’ to address these issues.
“Everyone thinks that a travel blogger’s life is an absolute dream. Partying in Cancun or Monaco one day, on a savanna safari with elephant herds the next, and always by private jet with the presidential suite at the best hotels, right?
“Don’t believe everything you see on social media though; our survey results show a bloggers life to be stressful regardless of how glamorous their content is and that’s why we came up with a term for this: ‘blogxiety.’
“It’s when bloggers feel burnt out because of the challenges they face beyond content creation,” says Ivan Baidin, CEO at Travelpayouts.
The ‘Blogxiety retreat’ will be held online on 27 July.
If the retreat doesn’t work bloggers might head to Canada to de-stress. The country has just been named the most cannabis friendly travel destination in the world, ahead of Mexico, Australia, Italy and the Netherlands.
Canada is the second country in the world to fully legalise the cultivation, possession, acquisition, and consumption of cannabis, according to Weedar, a loyalty and distribution platform for cannabis brands.
Revenge is not quite so sweet as travel falters
A report by Bankrate in the United States indicates the so-called ‘revenge spend’ travel is waning.
So, does that mean boom is turning to bust?
Not so, say some travel tech experts, although they stress that travel sellers need to adapt to the slowdown in demand.
Emilie Dumont, CEO of Digitrips, the multi-product B2B travel platform, says that “whilst the boom might be fading out, agents and other types of B2B sellers still have a positive future: the appetite for travel is still there, just people’s needs and budgets are changing”.
“The right technology and tools can help B2B and B2B2C sellers to showcase a broad range of travel options that appeal to all travel budgets.
“Now is the time to leverage capabilities of tech-enabled platforms to identify best deals and secure sales with fintech options such as flexibility or BNPL (buy-now, pay-later) services, and get ahead in what is likely to be a return to a very competitive environment,” Dumont adds.
Alex Gisbert, Fastpayhotels , a B2B platform for travel sellers and hotels predicts, “Everything points to an inevitable shift in traveller behaviour, but we knew that would happen, didn’t we? It’s clear that as interest rates continue to rise and inflation still won’t come down disposable income will falter.
“Continue offering maximum amounts of relevant choices to travellers and do so through segmenting and harnessing data to better understand their needs,” Gisbert says.
And this from Janis Dzenis from price comparison website WayAway, “Loyalty and discounts have become key elements in enticing cash-strapped travellers to book their next trip.
“While the hype of ‘revenge travel’ has waned, by maintaining an unwavering commitment to loyalty and providing discounts where feasible, travel suppliers and agencies can continue to attract customers while also weathering the shifting landscape of the travel industry.”
Traxo plugs those leaked bookings
Traxo, Inc., the world’s only provider of real-time corporate travel data capture, has launched NDCtracker.com, a site that provides a centralised source for news, deadlines and information intended to aid corporate travel managers and their partners in adapting to the imminent NDC-related changes in airline retailing.
The complimentary Traxo NDCtracker.com offers an updated catalogue of airline NDC status, progress, and dates, while Traxo’s patented ‘Filter’ technology automatically captures out-of-channel booking data and provides corporations with full travel visibility, proactively curated NDC-related details and news from various public sources, including ARC Direct Connect, IATA Airline Retailing Maturity (ARM), BTN, The Company Dime, PhocusWire, Duffel, Accelya, presenting them on the NDC dashboard for each global airline.
Andres Fabris, CEO and founder of Traxo, said the company is dedicated to helping TMCs and corporate travel organisations “avoid the detrimental effects of leaked bookings, including supplier-direct NDC bookings, by capturing and consolidating complete, real-time travel booking data from all sources.”
Traxo originated from a whitepaper written by three classmates at Harvard Business School as a solution to automatically detect overlaps in travel plans amongst friends.
Today, that same technology for detecting, parsing, standardising, and sorting travel bookings serves leading names in the travel industry, including American Express Global Business Travel, United Airlines, Lufthansa, EasyJet, TripAdvisor, International SOS, Crisis24, Fox World Travel, Advantage Travel, Coupa, Emburs and Abacus.
