Travel Tech Essentialist #71: Creator
I hope you all are having a great beginning of 2022. I’m looking forward to navigating this year with you. Any feedback and suggestions on how to make this newsletter better for you is always welcome!
This newsletter has been sponsored by Selfbook.
As the travel industry kicks off the New Year, Selfbook is helping to propel hotels into the future with directly bookable links, a seamless direct booking experience, and one-click digital wallet payments. The comprehensive transaction engine had a dazzling 2021, partnering with some of the most prestigious hotels such as Eden Rock St Barths, The LINE, and Maison Villeroy in its first year alone. As it enters its second year of business, Selfbook is gearing up to make hotels around the globe 2022-ready.
1. The future of the creator economy: shared ownership and control
Imagine an Airbnb-like platform owned by the hosts and guests. According to Li Jin, co-founder at Variant Fund, the next step is for creators to build, operate and own the products and platforms they rely on, shifting the balance of power between platforms and their users. In 2022, Li Jin thinks that decentralised networks serving the creator economy will reach a tipping-point. For innovators, rewarding users with ownership through token distribution can help attract the enormous user bases that will enable these new platforms to outcompete existing, centralised ones. Creator ownership eliminates the conflict between platforms and participants and ensures that growth benefits all stakeholders. Read + The Economist.
2. A blockchain enabled home sharing platform
Dtravel is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), owned and governed by its community of hosts, guests and token holders. By using real-value tokens to incentivize contributors, Dtravel wants to become the first true home sharing economy. The extent to which community members can contribute under the Support-to-Earn model will be based on each member’s time commitment, expertise and loyalty. Read more.
3. Three Web3 Travel Tech Startups
A few weeks ago I reached out to DTravel, Xeniapp and Weyout—three travel startups trying new models around blockchain, web3 and creator economy—to ask them about what they are building and how their approach differs from what is currently available. Read more.
4. Web3’s Pareto Funtier: More fun making money, and more money having fun
There are a lot of reasons – technological, financial, psychological, emotional, and more – that more and more people have been drawn to web3, but Packy McCormick thinks that think the simplest is this: Web3 pushes the Pareto Funtier outwards by baking money into fun things and fun into money things. Read more.
5. Airbnb’s $10 billion engineer
Nate Blecharczyk is Airbnb’s technical cofounder worth $10 billion thanks to his Airbnb stock. This is a good deep dive on how he’s using his engineering mindset and an army of data scientists to solve the company’s most challenging problems. Read more.
6. Brian Chesky asked, twitter responded
Brian Chesky asked on twitter: If Airbnb could launch anything in 2022, what would it be? He got plenty of responses. These are the replies (ordered by likes) that Brian acknowledged with “cool idea”, “we are looking into this” or similar.
7. US Airline Industry Review
Thorough research report on the state of the US airline industry. Trends in traffic, fares, operations, profitability, costs and financial performance. Includes many charts such as how the share of global carrier airlines, low cost, ultra low cost and niche carriers has evolved over the years.
8. The Icelandverse
“Introducing the Icelandverse” is a funny travel campaign from Iceland, making fun of Facebook’s name change to Meta and Mark Zuckerberg’s dreams of all of us interacting in a virtual three-dimensional world through avatars.
9. The 10 most clicked stories in Travel Tech Essentialist in 2021
In descending order:
Online Travel Trends Report, by Mario Gavira and Mauricio Prieto
Advice on Effective website content copywriting, by Matt Maiale (twitter)
Deep dive into the Product culture at Airbnb, by Ken Norton (Bring the Donuts newsletter)
Google’s Travel and destination insights that are accessible to all (used to be only available to its largest clients)
Google’s Get back to what you love video
The 10 commandments of salary negotiation, by Niya Dragova (Lenny’s newsletter)
What is the metaverse, by Shaan Puri (twitter)
Which is the next travel tech multi-billion dollar company? Survey results (Travel Tech Essentialist)
A playbook for fundraising, by Marc McCabe, Partner at Oyster Capital and formerly at Sequoia
10. Fundraising
Alternative accommodation platform AvantStay raised a Series B round of $160 million led by Tarsadia Investments and 3L Capital, following a Series A round of $20 million in September 2019.
GrowPro, the Spanish startup focused on facilitating international education experiences, raised €1 million (news in Spanish) in a round led by Angels Capital, the investment arm of Juan Roig
Travel Tech Essentialist job board
The Travel Essentialist job board can be a great resource whether you’re hiring or looking to be hired. Here are just a few of the amazing jobs seen on the board…
FindHotel: Lead Product Manager, Mobile, $75K-$120K, (Amsterdam, Remote)
FindHotel: Product Manager - Offers, $65K-$90K, (Amsterdam, Remote)
FindHotel: Senior Product Designer, Mobile Apps, $60K-$75K, (Amsterdam, Remote)
Travala.com: Chief Product Officer (Remote)
Browse more open roles (or add your own open roles) at Travel Tech Essentialist Job Board
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Have a great 2022,
Mauricio