Part 2: The Individual at the Center of the Universe

Price said the answer is for suppliers to flip the model and consolidate multiple relationships under the ownership of the individual rather than the businesses.

We are in the early stages of this, believes Price, with most companies just learning about the terms being used (see Glossary, at right).

“I think there are impediments to progress in travel and hospitality because of a lack of awareness at the travel provider level of the technical opportunities; [travel and hospitality] are typically late adopters—they will only move when they feel safe to move ahead,” he said.

Despite being at an early stage of development, Price said there are already “a few hundred” startups looking at the infrastructure around travel—wallets, chain, biometric enrollment—and are targeting these against specific use-cases.

“To my knowledge nobody yet has fully appreciated the opportunity around loyalty which is where one of the significant areas that could fundamentally change the dialogue for hospitality and travel with respect to customer interaction.”

Don Birch of Simard said that although the journey to SSI adoption will be a long one there are many examples of travel companies creating value in the blockchain environment and that value isn’t limited to an A to B connection. It’s one to many, or many to many.

“Once you join a chain, you can make contact with anyone on the chain,” said Birch. “It’s not like an API where you have to link just between A and B. The network effect is powerful.”

Birch foresees a future where those searching for flights, for example, won’t just have to take one of the options on the first page of the GDS. Rather, airlines will be making their best offers to the individual based on the information the individual chooses to share with each air carrier on the chain. And pulling on that same thread in terms of knowing the individual, Birch agrees that loyalty offers a fertile area for innovation.

SSI could also help suppliers identifying their most valuable travelers in a corporate program, for example.

“In the corporate world if you have a contract with United, the airline might give the travel manager 200 upgrade coupons which they hand around at Christmas,” said Birch. A blockchain-based loyalty program, however, could give everyone who flies United three times a month or is VP level or above an upgrade.

Quinn took that concept even further, envisioning a world where the individual, the supplier and the corporate entity could integrate their wants, needs, limitations and opportunities via the chain.

“If a loyalty program is already giving a status-holding corporate traveler a particular benefit, like an upgrade, why should the corporate buyer negotiate any cost of that benefit into the product they want offered to that individual? That’s buying something the traveler is already getting,” he said. With a networked chain that understands who the traveler is as well as the parameters and policies set by the corporate, that level of fine-tuning with loyalty could be possible within the blockchain environment.

Another example: If there were a benefit that corporates did not want extended to their business travelers—perhaps a frequent traveler perk that pushes the traveler to sample a supplier in the ecosystem in lieu of a corporate preferred—there should be the ability to program that policy limitation into the three-way integration. And, if for some reason such a benefit was extended to the traveler, the chain would have a record of that offer, which would be easily auditable by the corporate.

It's the latter example that raised the eyebrow of an industry consultant, who wished to remain anonymous in discussing this topic out of concern for potentially damaging their supplier relationships.

“I think you can play nice in the first example, but it’s a slippery slope when you go deep into personalization,” they said. “This is where [the suppliers] don’t care about a corporate deal. It’s a safety net and they’re going to bet on their loyalty programs every single time. If they can’t get them through the loyalty program, then they’ll try the safety net of the corporate deal that will hopefully pick them up.”

The consultant gave as an example, an almost identical scenario as the Hilton/Marriott traveler that Price referred to above.

“Let's just say that on that particular route your organization has a deal with airline A. Airline B sees that traveler flies that route a lot but never with them, so Airline B puts an offer together on that particular route or offers an upgrade. They’ll offer whatever… but now that offer is potentially at odds with what the organization might want because the personalization has gone deep to an individual level as opposed to corporate. You’d have to have safeguards and there are so many purchase decisions that it would be really difficult to decide which ones.”

Supporters of SSI and blockchain solutions hold up the auditable nature of the platform in such scenarios, but detractors see it as a proverbial game of whack-a-mole that travel managers shouldn’t have to handle.

But supporters also say, it can’t be stopped.

“This is the way the world is going,” according to Quinn, and not because of loyalty innovation but because of data security.

“The blockchain economy can create an immutable level of security based on cryptography and that fundamental change can be of great advantage to suppliers in the travel industry, particular those companies which have experienced data breaches,” he said.

Travelers grant access to data and then pull that access when they wish to do so. Therefore, personal data would never need to sit with a supplier—a hotel, for instance, which is a category particularly vulnerable to hackers.