Legacy Online Travel Unfairly Limits Business Opportunity

The team at Xeni believe that today’s online travel industry is in dire need of disruption – if not complete transformation. They see an industry reliant on an outdated infrastructure that is rife with inefficiencies, delivers poor customer experiences, and locks smaller players - who are best placed to deliver better, more targeted experiences - out of the market.

First and foremost, there is a massive technology barrier to setting up an online travel business. Unless you have access to the talent and capital required to build a highly performant booking engine so that potential customers can self-book and securely pay through your website, launching a business is nearly impossible.

Second, online travel services often rely on complex distribution channels involving various intermediaries, such as travel agents, aggregators, and online marketplaces. Navigating these channels and managing relationships with multiple partners can be time-consuming and resource-intensive for any businesses – let alone a new entrant to the space. Coordinating inventory, pricing, and availability across different platforms and ensuring seamless integration pose significant challenges that unfairly shut out smaller players. The main alternative for would-be travel businesses is to participate in affiliate programs with existing legacy travel sites. But doing so requires giving up any autonomy in setting pricing markups, acceptance of very low commission rates, and worst of all, loss of ownership of customer data once you’ve handed them off to these sites.

Finally, one of the biggest pain points for online travel businesses relates to inefficiencies in the existing, legacy systems used for payment and commission settlement. Even top travel executives flag these as massive challenges facing their businesses with 24% of online travel CFO’s believing that it takes too long to receive payments, and 23% feeling that it’s too difficult to obtain real-time access to sales and transaction data*. From a sales perspective, there is a constant threat of lack of commission payments for online sales with up to 40% of commissions owed never being paid!

Reimagining How Online Travel Should Be

Seeing the myriad of challenges that were keeping businesses from selling travel to their customers, the team at Xeni became committed to delivering a platform that would transform the travel industry. Rachel Obenshain, Xeni’s President and Co-founder sums it up as follows “for far too long it's been extremely difficult for more participants to get into business selling travel online, there are too many roadblocks. Building a booking engine that works is very, very difficult from a tech perspective, gaining access to wholesale pricing from vendors takes time and resources that smaller businesses just don’t have; and, the payment settlement process is outrageous. Xeni wants to completely reshape the industry and level the playing field.”

With Xeni, all of these barriers to selling travel online have been eliminated. Businesses no longer have to make onerous investments in the infrastructure required to launch a site, nor spend the time and resources required to develop relationships with distribution channel participants. Most importantly, they no longer have to be beholden to the traditional players that have made it a one-sided deal for smaller businesses that have wanted to sell travel to their own customers. With Xeni, they can maintain ownership of their customer data, have complete flexibility to determine their markups on travel offerings, and payments can be settled in real time – no more non-payments, no more lost revenue.

How does Xeni do this? By providing a turn-key solution that enables business subscribers to instantly launch their own customized ecommerce website to sell travel to their customers. The Xeni platform offers business subscribers immediate access to a booking engine that comes loaded with inventory at wholesale rates. Their user-friendly, intuitive, Shopify-like experience makes it easy to build an online travel experience that caters to the needs and expectations of their target market – even if they have limited technical expertise.

What really differentiates Xeni is their back-end infrastructure, which is built on distributed ledger technology. This allows their system to fully automate many of the critical processes of an online travel platform, including those tied to commission payments and payouts to travel resellers and vendors. They are also able to streamline account reconciliation for every participant doing business on the platform and store all of their transaction information on ledger. The distributed ledger that makes up this back-end for Xeni is Hedera. “Our platform needs to be able to support and track a lot of very complex multistage transactions at scale, so using a DAG-based distributed ledger like Hedera makes a ton of sense for us. Not only do we get what we need in that regard, we are also getting fee reliability, which is a huge plus. A lot of what we strive to do is reduce costs for our customers, and the Hedera network offers that with their low-cost and predictable transaction fees”, says Jean Phillippe Creedon, Technical Co-founder of Xeni.

Let’s take a closer look.

Driving Industry Transformation with Hedera

Xeni is taking maximum advantage of various web3 technologies to transform the restrictive and inefficient processes seen in legacy online travel platforms. This transformation has been successful in part thanks to the capabilities and services offered on the Hedera network. So how is Hedera being leveraged?

When a user first signs into Xeni - whether they are a business subscriber, vendor, or traveler - a Hedera digital wallet is created for them. Xeni can assume custody of the wallet on behalf of the user, or the user can take custody themselves, there is total flexibility. Regardless, a highly secure API is in place to help facilitate any transactions that the wallet is a part of and all activity is recorded on ledger.

In order to streamline payment and settlement - notoriously inefficient and unreliable processes for legacy online travel sites - Xeni has created a decentralized accounting and settlement solution called XeniPay. The XeniPay solution uses the Hedera Token Service, Consensus Service, and Smart Contract Service to manage these processes.

So for example, when a booking is made by a traveler on a business subscriber’s website and the traveler submits payment, whether in fiat or crypto, the payment is tokenized by the Hedera Token Service. These tokens will then be used to represent the payment amount. Xeni then takes all of the data associated with the booking, including: booking ID, refund policy data, commission structure, transaction date, etc., and sends it to the Hedera Consensus Service where this transaction data is recorded on ledger. Once these transaction details are verified, XeniPay then uses the Hedera Smart Contract service to automate the settlement process, ensuring that the minted tokens are transferred securely and transparently to the wallets of the subscriber, inventory providers, and any potential counterparties that receive a commission on the transaction. This entire process happens almost instantly and the threat of non-payment is eliminated. When finalized any received tokens can then be redeemed for the corresponding fiat or crypto.

This all happens without any of the participants needing to be familiar with the technologies that are enabling any of these processes - and that’s exactly how Sachin Narode, CEO and Founder of Xeni wants it to be. “We're leveraging the technology in an abstract way for our client base. We want to make sure our users who are much more familiar with the web2 experience are able to take advantage of the features and capabilities of web3 technologies such as digital wallets, distributed ledgers, tokenization - all of it - without moving out of their comfort zone. They shouldn’t have to be concerned with this and should be allowed to focus on their business instead.”

With this, Xeni has done the impossible. They have taken an archaic, inequitable, legacy system and transformed it into a hyper-efficient, flexible, secure, and fair platform for all parties involved - all while completely abstracting the web3 technologies upon which it is built. There is ease of use at every step, ensuring the highest quality user experience for business subscribers, vendors, and travelers.

The Xeni Roadmap: Continuous Innovation of the Future of Online Travel Sales

There are many exciting areas of growth for the platform going forward. Xeni will soon be implementing a reward system by leveraging the robust tooling the Hedera network provides for creating and managing these programs. This will provide the ability to encourage desired actions on the part of subscribers, vendors, and subscriber clients alike, to help drive continuous improvement and success of the platform.

There are also plans to explore a marketplace for all things travel, where items such as flights or hotel bookings can be turned into NFTs that can then be bought, sold, or traded within the marketplace. Enabling even greater flexibility in travel options for consumers as well as revenue opportunities.

The future of online travel is finally here – and thanks to Xeni, it truly benefits all of us.

* https://www.pymnts.com/news/b2b-payments/2022/24-percent-travel-tourism-cfos-say-slow-payment-is-top-challenge/