Zug, Switzerland, September 20, 2023 - DER Touristik Online and Lufthansa Group have joined forces with the web3 startup Chain4Travel to organize the very first web3 & travel hackathon. This collaboration has yielded remarkable results, producing Proof of Concepts powered by Camino Network technology in a matter of days.
DER Touristik Online hosted the hackathon last week in Frankfurt with Lufthansa Group and Chain4Travel. In the hackathon, teams of DER Touristik Online developers competed against each other to build a tokenization platform for the consumption of Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) on Camino Network, the Web3 travel ecosystem.
DER Touristik Online (DTO) was founded as a startup and independent company of DER Touristik Group with roughly 9,200 employees worldwide. DTO is the online competence center of DER Touristik in Central Europe and bundles strategic and operational tasks of online sales and travel tech. Their hackathon partner, Lufthansa Group, is one of the largest airlines in Europe, with over 100,000 employees worldwide and revenue of over 32 billion Euros in 2022.
DER Touristik recently became the world’s first major tour operator to acquire SAF from Lufthansa Group, enabling it to improve the carbon footprint of selected products by reducing the carbon footprint of air travel by as much as 80% with this new fuel. Through this initiative, it can offer environmentally-conscious travelers the opportunity to reduce their carbon emissions when flying on vacation.
The hackathon showcased the unique potential of Web3 technologies to aid the multi-billion dollar global travel industry’s sustainability drive. The competing teams focused on creating a compelling and simplified way for travelers to obtain SAF credits when booking a vacation, tracing their carbon emission reductions, and conceiving new ways of gamifying the process of acquisition and expenditure of SAF.
The winning team’s solution included a loyalty program and a mechanism to track interactions and settlements between travelers, DER Touristik, Lufthansa Group, and potentially many other partners by transacting “Dertorium,” a green token representing the currency of an alliance around sustainability, meant to integrate with (while not substituting) existing partners’ loyalty schemes. “At Chain4Travel, we loved the approach as it zeroes on what makes a use case compelling on blockchain, and on Camino Network especially,” says Ralf Usbeck, CEO of Chain4Travel.
The developers in the competing teams had no experience in Web3 prior to the hackathon. Despite that and with tech support by BytePitch, an experienced Camino community member, they were able to present their working prototypes deployed on the Camino Network’s Columbus testnet in front of the jury, which consisted of CEO of DER Touristik Central Europe Ingo Burmester, Director Leisure Sales Germany from Lufthansa Group Jan Lieske, and CEO of Chain4Travel Ralf Usbeck. Having done that in less than 4 days shows how easily blockchain technology can be adopted.
About Camino Network Foundation
Camino Network Foundation is a non-profit organization based in Zug, Switzerland, driving the development of a blockchain-based ecosystem in the global travel industry. The Camino Network Foundation supports the development of Camino Network, the first Layer 1 blockchain built specifically for the travel industry by travel technology experts.
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Avishay Litani