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It can be argued that, in its current state, the travel industry is riddled with hidden charges, comprised mostly of fees charged by aggregators and payment gateways. Companies offering to make the booking process simpler often charge an exorbitant premium for the convenience as well. As a result, most people are forced to check with multiple providers for the best price available, making the entire booking process unnecessarily complicated.
XcelTrip , a new feeless travel booking platform, however, is hoping to reduce the overhead of travelling and living by a significant amount. The company’s end goal is to be a decentralized travel ecosystem, allowing consumers to directly interact with vendors sans any middlemen.
Instead of relying on a fee-based model adopted by most of its competitors, XcelTrip’s primary source of income will be from vendors paying for advertising space and priority search listing. The company is also boasting an “earning-added model”, with its Independent Marketing Partner Program (IMP). The program encourages users of the platform to list a vendor on the XcelTrip platform, who are then rewarded with a percentage-based commission. Both services will be offered in exchange for the company’s upcoming digital currency, XCEL.
Merging the Travel Industry with Blockchain
Unlike traditional travel providers and hotel aggregators such as Expedia and Airbnb, the decentralized model proposed by XcelTrip comes with the advantage of a significantly reduced fee schedule . Furthermore, given that the platform is built on a blockchain, identifiable user data is cryptographically encrypted and not in the hands of the company itself.
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XcelTrip believes that once its digital token, XCEL, becomes the standard for travel-related transactions, it will be able to disrupt the industry by offering higher margins and profitability to users and vendors. Given that the token is deeply integrated within the platform, user demand for it will also increase with time, rewarding users with appreciable returns on their holdings or earnings.
The XcelTrip development team has not only been developing and refining the platform for several years, but also already has a functional web service that can be used to book flights , with support for hotels coming soon. Other new features are also being added in the near future, with support for features specific to the XcelToken also in the pipeline.
While XcelTrip has only primarily focused on air travel and accommodation-related vendors so far, a range of other services will also be supported. Once fully released, the platform will cover most of the travel and hospitality industry, allowing users to pay for everything from rail tickets to restaurants to even spas.
The XCEL Token Sale
The XcelToken is already available for purchase on the XcelToken website as part of an public coin sale as of March 20, 2018. The sale is scheduled to last until May 19, after which the company will begin the process of listing the token on various cryptocurrency exchanges. As a timed incentive, XcelTrip is also offering 20 percent bonus XCEL on every purchase during the sale period.
According to the white paper released by the company, the XcelToken is an ERC20 compliant token built on top of the Ethereum blockchain, the implementation for which will be made open source. The token will have a hard cap of 50 billion, out of which only 5 billion is being offered for public sale at a price equivalent to 0.11 US Dollars.
As per the company’s roadmap, it will be rolling out support for a range of new types of vendors in addition to a tokenized rewards and loyalty program in near future. While in the immediate future, XcelToken will allow the company to take its first step towards decentralization, XcelTrip is aiming to be a completely decentralized travel ecosystem by sometime in 2019.
