Founders of Winding Tree behind Web3 solution to solve corporate travel pain points
WINDING Tree, the non-profit blockchain decentralised travel marketplace, had just gone live with a couple of airlines towards the end of 2019 when Covid hit and brought the project to a standstill.
“The silver lining was,” said co-founder Pedro Renaud Anderson, “a corporate buyer reached out and said it wanted to see change and wanted a way to work with Winding Tree for direct corporate bookings.”
To facilitate that, Anderson and co-founder set up Simard, which is a Web3 technology company enabling solutions for legacy problems in corporate travel, as well as sell products and provides services related to Winding Tree. “There’s no better time to fix travel than now,” said the Brazilian-born entrepreneur, who was living and working in Ukraine and left just before the Russian invasion.
Pedro Renaud Anderson: “The problem with travel is it’s driven by oligopoly and they are all working with each other to keep others out.”
Explaining the pain points in corporate travel, he said, “Airlines negotiate hard (eg discounts) and soft benefits (eg upgrades, status match, waivers and favours) to corporations but are challenged bringing these benefits to the traveller at the point sale.
“Intermediaries (GDS, TMCs) add cost to distribution without direct performance criteria that match payments with incremental airline revenue.
“Corporations want validation that their contracts have been correctly fulfilled and disputes arise on different sources of contract performance measurement.
“Continuous pricing and dynamic bundling represent a great opportunity for airlines to differentiate their services with unique corporate pricing and content, but current corporate buyer strategies are focused on discounts off of published rates
“Credit card fees represent significant airline expense on every ticket add 2-3% to settlement.”
Simard’s solutions include smart contracts which enable tailored corporate fare packages, API-API connections managed by the marketplace using ORGiD, genuine private fares – dynamic private fare bundles that are managed point to point without a third party database, and fast cheap, direct settlement for 1% (fiat-crypto-fiat).
It is currently working on a project to connect American Airlines with a corporate buyer that wants to offer leisure travel offerings to its employees. “Corporates which have negotiated discounts, soft upgrades, lounge access are not getting direct access right now because there are layers and layers of intermediation,” said Anderson.
Anderson said Winding Tree also offered the first ever NFT hotel booking on chain, for Eth Amsterdam, the Ethereum event that returned to Amsterdam April 22-24. “We created an interface for attendees to book their rooms by buying an NFT that represents their nights’ stay. When delegates book the room, they are not entering any information other than connecting their crypto wallet, they just say, I want to book that room and pay in crypto, and with the NFT in hand they are in,” said Anderson.
Up to the time when the pandemic happened, Winding Tree had 50 businesses with work IDs working on the platform. “The benefit of working with Winding Tree is getting access to content that they don’t have yet or not getting from an intermediary or you have content that we don’t have.”
Companies pay a 1% deposit that goes into a treasury wallet that is controlled by the community.
Anderson said that from the beginning “we built Winding Tree as a non-profit to solve the problems we wanted to solve, to decentralise travel. The problem with travel is it’s driven by oligopoly and they are all working with each other to keep others out. We want to challenge that.”
It’s been a long, hard road though to get traction since its founding in 2016. There’s been resistance and skepticism and possibly the early hype in its startup years did not help when it could not show any real use cases due to scalability challenges of Ethereum at the time to prove its viability. Simard is clearly an for-profit avenue for the founders to earn revenues while supporting their original aim of building a non-profit decentralised travel marketplace.
Anderson is used to being an outsider fighting for change. He went to Ukraine in 2004 so that he could bear witness to the revolution that was happening in the country at the time. “As a young person, I was interested to see change. That experience made me realise how much change was possible and I was hooked on Ukraine.”
While there, he did non-profit work for a foundation in hospitality, fighting human trafficking, working with orphans over 18 years old. “We would find hospitality jobs for them around the world,” he said.
He then joined the startup team of Attendify, an event tech company, that was recently acquired by Hopin.
“We stumbled on the idea for this (Winding Tree) while my co-founder was working on a travel startup out of Y-Combinator, designing a tool to help travellers find rooms during storms and weather disruptions. He found crazy fees, which were such a barrier to innovation. A new startup working with legacy systems, that’s an innovation killer.
“It’s hard to innovate within the core of travel and we decided we got to do something to change distribution. We needed to find a solution that would stop us from becoming the next intermediary – that’s what led us to blockchain in 2016.”
