Cynthia and the Journey Toward a Decentralized Travel Experience

Dtravel's token and ecosystem for direct bookings, including meta-search

Episode Summary

In this episode of Web3 Magic podcast I talk to Cynthia Huang. Cyn is a co-founder of Dtravel. She shares her journey into Web3 and how she got to the creation of a decentralized travel platform. She discusses the challenges in the short-term rental industry and the need for direct connections between travelers and hosts. 

Cynthia explains the role of smart contracts and blockchain in ensuring secure, cheap(er) and transparent transactions. She also highlights the importance of community-driven ecosystems and the benefits of decentralized platforms. The fact is that as a host or traveler, you are today in the mercy of large platforms like AirBnB or Booking.com. If they decide to expel you from their platforms, you will have an extremely difficult time finding guests.

Cynthia invites hosts to join Dtravel to expand their distribution channels and encourages travelers to join the waitlist for the upcoming meta-search feature. (I am already in!)

Takeaways

  • Web3 attracts individuals with diverse backgrounds and perspectives, making it an interesting place to work and build a career.

  • Smart contracts and blockchain technology provide secure and transparent transactions in the travel industry.

  • Dtravel aims to empower direct connections between travelers and hosts, offering an alternative to centralized platforms.

  • The meta-search feature on Dtravel will provide a personalized and user-friendly experience for travelers. Something we are all waiting for!

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Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Background

01:04 Journey into Web3

03:00 Building a Crypto Gaming Simulation App

04:22 Issues in Short-Term Rentals

07:12 The Role of Partners and the Ecosystem

08:27 Creating a Meta Search for Direct Bookings

09:49 The Importance of Smart Contracts and Blockchain

13:02 The Creation of a Native Token

17:45 The Vision for the Future of Travel

21:08 Booking Properties on Dtravel

22:49 Joining the Waitlist for the Meta Search

25:58 Shifting Power Dynamics in the Travel Industry

29:13 The Dtravel Team and Their Expertise

32:00 Actions for Hosts and Travelers

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Transcript

BFG (aka Pete): 0:23

Hello everyone. So we are back, and today my lovely guest is Cynthia, and Cynthia is one of the people who is trying to revolutionize the travel. Travel industry was always my favorite when I started my career. I traveled too much, so I ended up with like post-its on the you know tables by the bed, like which city I'm in, where am I waking up. So I slowed down a lot considerably from there, but I'm sure that you know, once Cynthia's project takes over the world, I might become a traveler again, cynthia, welcome.

Cynthia (Dtravel): 1:05

Hey, peter, thanks so much for having me. I love that story. By the way, I don't know if I believe that there can be too much travel.

BFG (aka Pete): 1:12

Right, well, yeah, we can talk about it offline, but yeah, I can persuade you it can be. By the way, let's start like we usually start. So tell us, how did you get to Web3? You know where it started.

Cynthia (Dtravel): 1:27

Yeah, one thing that I find interesting about people's journey into Web3 is that most people who come into Web3 have really interesting backgrounds. It's not typical, like a lot of other industries, where you study a specific subject and then you find a job and you follow this career path. What's beautiful about Web3 is we have so many people with lots of diverse backgrounds and perspectives that come in. I think that's why Web3 is a pretty interesting place to work and build your career, but for me. I think it was a bit of an accident actually. So in 20, I think, 2013, I used to love attending hackathons, and the first time I heard about Bitcoin was at the money 2020 hackathon, when somebody was building a project on Bitcoin and he wore a hot dog suit and I had no idea there was a connection between a hot dog suit and Bitcoin, but it was interesting and I remember thinking, oh, I don't know what this Bitcoin thing is. It sounds like a scam. Pretty typical reaction, I think, when people hear crypto. So fast forward to 2015, 2016 and my husband actually got really into Ethereum and learning about it because he's a developer and he started mining, and so we had a whole bunch of mining rigs in our house. They wanted to test Ethereum, and I think that was really the first worry when I started learning about it. And then I ended up building a crypto gaming simulation that would help people learn about trading crypto, and the reason for that was in 2017, which was when we built the app there really were no use cases for crypto, unlike now. The primary use case was about trading or financial instruments. That was how people came to crypto. So the on-ramp was I look at different coins and I look at what I wanted to trade. That was pretty much all that you could do, but the problem was that even then we were obviously talking about adoption. One of the biggest hurdles and it still is, I think, today is there's obviously a lot of scams, a lot of complexity and a lot of tokens, and so how do you onboard somebody to make it safe for them to be able to interact and learn without them potentially losing money? So our thesis was around how do we make it fun for people to invest and learn about the industry, but without losing any money, so they could essentially build this fake portfolio and then participate in trading competitions with real prizes and compete against other people, and then, once they get comfortable, then they could actually onboard onto a real exchange and then start to build up their portfolio, and that was actually doing really well. We got to over 350,000 users, all organic. Unfortunately, google at the time was not crypto friendly and they ended up shutting us down, which was pretty commonplace back then for a lot of app developers that were building on either Google or the app store, and so what ended up happening was a group of us came together who were from the travel industry but also have a lot of experience in blockchain, and we noticed that there were a lot of issues happening in short term rental specifically, and we kind of came from two angles. So one of the angles was, if you wanted to, let's say, build a travel company and have short term rental supply, there was no single source of an API connection that would aggregate all short term rental. So it was actually really hard to build a business that would help you distribute short term rentals because Airbnb, for example, they keep everything within their own platform and they don't have any external APIs because their whole value proposition is around having unique properties that are just on Airbnb. The second position was that I've been a host for the last decade and I also co-founded one of the largest Airbnb host forums because I've been really passionate about this space for a long time. In my business my hosting business I was seeing a lot of changes that weren't good. The host community, I think over the last five years especially, has become increasingly unhappy with how the community has been treated. So when we first started hosting in, I mean, airbnb started in 2008, but when I started in 2014, it was very community driven. So there was very much a focus on hosting, on communities, on hosts helping each other, and I very much drank the Kool-Aid from Airbnb around. We love our hosts. You guys are everything to us. You're the most important part of our community. Exactly, it was just and I truly do believe that they really meant it Airbnb naive, but every meetup that I went to and I even got to meet not Brian, but not Brian I forgot the other founder's name, but they would have these VIP events for their super hosts and community builders and so actually got a chance to meet the team and I think they genuinely really believed in this mission that they had. But, I think, just because of you know, obviously they're a public company. Now, as they've grown, I think they've really had to focus and try and monetize and be profitable right, and what's happened is that, not only for hosts but also for travelers, the experience has really gone downhill, and so I think that's really led to an opportunity where we saw that we could actually rebuild something that felt like an Airbnb but that was much more community driven. And if we took away this concept of, you know, public companies and shareholders, how we actually keep the ethos of how Airbnb started, which was being really community driven and, you know, establish ownership and give ownership back to the community, which was something that was definitely really important to me personally, having kind of gone through this journey of being a host for the last decade right, okay, so you see I I brought up the detravel because I assume that's what what we are talking about, and I think I saw Airbnb mentioned somewhere on the on the website, but I didn't really connect it.

BFG (aka Pete): 7:54

That it's like Airbnb killer. So you guys are basically really trying to connect the properties directly with the travelers, right? Exactly yes and then, okay, I'm not gonna steal it from you, but I would like you to then educate me about on the role of partners and you know, the whole ecosystem thing where you want to start?

Cynthia (Dtravel): 8:23

yeah, so I think you you mentioned it, but we think of ourselves really as an ecosystem, and the reason why we have taken this ecosystem approach is, you know, I don't even think that we're an Airbnb killer. I don't think that's necessarily what we're trying to do. I think that what we're our vision is is this world where direct connections are more rewarding and more performing. You really don't have an intermediary. I think that there's definitely with market forces. There's always going to be people who want something like an Airbnb, and so we're not saying to people you have to use the travel or you have to use Airbnb, and those are binary choices. I think there's actually a spectrum and what we're trying to do is give people who want an option to not have an intermediary, to give them that option, because the problem has been that if you want to have bookings as a host, most of the only options that you have are around centralized platforms, because it's how you connect with guests. But we're trying to give people an option that is different from that, where they still maintain all of their control and have ownership, and for us to replace something like an Airbnb or at least give people an alternative. There's a lot of solutions that we have to solve within that, and that's why we have this ecosystem approach, because within the ecosystem it has many pieces for that solution. So the first is having a direct booking solution, so that's infrastructure for our folks, so that they can actually go up with a guest instead of through a platform. The second thing is a meta-search, and that's where travelers are going to be able to come to detravel and actually be able to connect with a host, and this is something that actually doesn't really exist in the industry today, which sounds crazy, but we don't have a meta-search for it does, right? yeah, we don't have a meta-search for direct booking, meaning that if you go to Airbnb, those are all centralized bookings, right. Airbnb is the platform in the middle and there's really no way for you to connect directly with a host. The only way for you to really do that is if you happen to stumble across a website that is a host direct booking website. So kind of like, if you went to the Marriott website, for example, you're booking directly with the hotel. Same thing if you go on to a host website and it's their website that you're booking directly with them. But it's very, very challenging to be able to find those websites because we don't have a centralized place for that, and so that's really what we're trying to build out, which makes it really easy to be able to say hey, I want to go stay in Lisbon. How do I find a place that I can book directly with that guest? Because I want to have that interaction directly with them. And I want to say you know the 15 to 20 percent fees I have to pay on these platforms, and we are actually going to be launching our Meta-Search very soon, in Q1, and what we're really excited about is it's actually going to be part of by AI. What's interesting about travel is we've been talking about personalization for a really long time, so the idea is that if you go to any travel website, it should be a customized experience for you. And I think until we've had AI and AI as it is today, we haven't really had the technology to be able to do that. And I think when you combine AI and web3 specifically, there's a lot of knowledge about it because with web3 or blockchain, you have the data piece right where you can say, hey, I have access to all of this data, all this historical data, and it's pretty easy to query. But then what do you do with parsing out the huge amounts of data that exists on blockchains is really hard to do. But then when you add in AI, that can quickly, very intentionally, figure out what data that you mean and then pull that data and customize it according to whoever's using it, I think that becomes really helpful. So, with the Meta-Search, how that's going to work is if you're, say, going to Lisbon for Web Summit and you want to have a one-bedroom very close to the conference, it has to have Wi-Fi, a specific work area, you want to have a lawful driver and a certain Wi-Fi speed. Then you can put that in and it becomes a travel profile for you, and then the AI will recognize what's important to you based on your policy travel history. I'd be able to recommend things that feel very specific instead of something that's more general, which is the search experience. Right now, you would go to Expedia or Airbnb and you kind of have to parse through the information yourself, which obviously isn't the best travel experience. But with the tool that we're building out, you essentially won't have to put any of that preference in, because it will learn from your past little history.

BFG (aka Pete): 13:08

Well, I have thousands of questions, but so I'll ask the most obvious one. So so aren't you just gonna replace the centralized platforms with another centralized platform then?

Cynthia (Dtravel): 13:25

No, so all of the. So that's why we were meta-searched, meaning that we power the search part of it, but all of the listings. There are all direct booking listings, and that's very deliberate, because our mission is to empower direct connections between travelers and hosts, and so we don't want to be another centralized entity. So the booking will always occur directly with a host, so that it's a peer-to-peer booking. But really what we're doing is we're making it easier for people to be able to find those properties.

BFG (aka Pete): 13:57

Awesome. So I guess you know. Maybe a little bit step back question, but important one not to forget. So what's behind the hood? I usually don't talk about chains and tokens here, but I think it's important to ask, on top of what you guys are building the foundation, because it looks like it's supposed to stay.

Cynthia (Dtravel): 14:27

So the technology piece is actually. One thing I like to say is the technology isn't really important because of the technology. It's about the why behind the technology. And so with our booking contracts, those are using smart contracts, which is essentially a code that says if something happens, then this other thing happens. Obviously very simple, but your audience isn't super technical. So just to keep it really high level, and the reason that smart contracts for booking this especially if you're booking this really important is when you have an intermediary in the middle, whether that's a platform or a payment processor, you're vulnerable to that, and so what ends up happening often is let's say you're using bookingcom right, and this is a real example. Last year, for six months, what happened was any host in Europe who were using bookingcom. They had their payments held, meaning that they were owed tens of thousands of dollars, often for one host, and yet they're running their business and they're paying for these expenses, but because of a payment issue with bookingcom, hosts weren't getting payouts. Another example is let's say you're using PayPal or Stripe. What happens all the time is either your account gets flagged because maybe you might have a bunch of chargebacks, or someone says that you're doing something fraudulent, or they pull out of your market. And so now?

BFG (aka Pete): 15:52

you're Happening to me almost every month.

Cynthia (Dtravel): 15:55

Exactly so. I think people who don't run payments don't really understand how big of a problem this is. But if your only way to run your business is to take payments through a payment processor, I mean, you're in a really, really vulnerable position. And that's really what the beauty of smart contract and blockchains allow you to do is, because you can't change them after you create them and you truly own them because it's attached to your wallet. That means that nobody can come along and say, hey, pierre, I'm going to cancel your smart contract account and so you can't take payments anymore. Nobody can do that, and so I think for us to get to a really sustainable world where we're not just relying on these payment processors, smart contracts are really the way to be able to do that, and I think another example I'll give is with the Russia-Ukraine war. All of the Russian hosts had their BNB account cancelled. I totally understand why that obviously happened, but if you're a host in Russia now, all of a sudden, you have no way to run your business, and it might even be that you're hosting people within Russia for very legitimate reasons, where you've got people visiting families, you need to travel for business, etc. If you're relying on Airbnb, paypal, etc. You have no way to run your business. But if you have a smart contract that you can continue to take bookings from, now, you can do that, and so I think there's very, very important reasons that often in like the Western countries, we don't really think about. But that's why I think there's really high crypto adoption in places like Latin America, turkey, a lot of parts of Asia, because it's not really just a speculative instrument for people to buy, but it's actually solving a real-world problem. I think in short-term rentals or travel specifically, this is becoming more and more of an issue over time, and so we're trying to get ahead of that curve and provide infrastructure that people need to solve these problems that they're already facing.

BFG (aka Pete): 18:05

Yeah, totally agree. So I think good angle to look at would be you guys created your own token right Is it for governance or for payments for both, and why you didn't decide to use any other token, which are yeah, so definitely governance payments and then other utility within our ecosystem.

Cynthia (Dtravel): 18:33

So the idea is very much that it's for access and for benefit, and the token specifically I think one of the important parts of the token why we wanted to create our own is in 2020, covid happened and there were mass cancellations across the entire travel industry right, but specifically as it relates to short-term rentals, what ended up happening is a lot of people were expecting payments to come in things that were made, let's say, a year ago or six months ago. They have staff, they have mortgages, they have a lot of expenses that they have to pay Because of these mass cancellations. All of a sudden, they have no revenue. Now, on the flip side of that, at the end of that same year, airbnb has the largest IPO of 2020, right, and what ended up happening was, overnight, you had a ton of millionaires and even some billionaires from that IPO. Now, as a community builder for the last decade, I think that there's definitely a very real imbalance of value. That happens when a company goes public, and I think that's okay if everybody in your community is healthy. But I think when you're making a lot of money off of people but then you're not really sharing the benefits of that. I think that becomes a really unhealthy, unsustainable ecosystem. And I think that's what makes Web 3 really different and that's why a lot of people are attracted to it. And people are tired of contributing value to an ecosystem but not really getting benefit from it. And even worse, what ends up happening is often with companies. As they start out, they're very customer focused because that's where they know the value has to come from. But as they grow this ecosystem that becomes really big, then they move further away from that and become less and less community driven over time. And I think that was really what characterized Web 2 by going into Web 3. I think that will happen less and less because people are really tired of contributing this value and not really getting that back.

BFG (aka Pete): 20:54

Yeah, I think it's a typical company journey these days.

Cynthia (Dtravel): 20:57

Exactly.

BFG (aka Pete): 20:59

You start with your customers and then you end up with yourself. I worked with some corporations where people would basically keep themselves busy inside. The company never saw the customer. No need enough meetings internally. Who like to talk to someone from outside? Let's look at the practical side now. So are there any properties I could book right now on de-travel? Yes, definitely Can I do it with my credit card or do I need the token?

Cynthia (Dtravel): 21:32

No, no. So you can pay with Fiat, so any credit card, essentially, and then you can also pay with crypto. So right now we're on the B&B chain, but we're going to be expanding to other chains, including Matic, because for us, especially where we see real world adoption happening since travel is something that touches everybody all around the world, it's not a niche product like a DEX or anything like that we want to make it as easy as possible for anyone, even a grandma, to be able to use the infrastructure that we built and book here to appear. So on the back. And how we're going to make that really easy is, if let's say, for example, I'm the host and you're the traveler, if you want to pay in, let's say, I don't know Bitcoin, but I prefer to actually have my settlement in US DC, we're actually going to automate all of that on the back end, so that you just set your preference and then it becomes really easy for two people to come up without really having to figure out what the currency is in between Very much the same way that Forex happens today. That's the vision we're building towards, because I think that the future is obviously going to be multi-chain and cross-chain and we can't really make adoption happen without that.

BFG (aka Pete): 22:45

Absolutely so. Let me just quickly have a look. I'm a traveler, I want to find a stay and you want me to join the waitlist. When am I getting off the waitlist so I can actually book? Is it like the approval process, or are you guys heading up towards some big launch?

Cynthia (Dtravel): 23:05

Yeah, so the AI meta search that I mentioned. That's what this waitlist is for.

BFG (aka Pete): 23:10

Oh okay. Cool. So is it a secret or you can tell me how many properties and which countries we can go with the travel right now?

Cynthia (Dtravel): 23:23

Yeah, so it's not a secret. The reason why I think our growth has been a little bit slower is because we don't have a search, so every property has to essentially do their own marketing, which is why we're coming up with this meta search. We have properties in the US, in Australia, in the UK, different parts of Europe, and then we have Thailand and some in Indonesia. So we're definitely looking to grow our property accounts, and that's primarily through partnerships, because a lot of property managers who want distribution through something like a meta search will be able to distribute their properties directly to the travel.

BFG (aka Pete): 24:04

Sure, yeah, so I've spent some time in the travel industry so I think getting people on board with something new is hard in any industry. But if you promise a distribution without 20% or 30% fee, everybody will be happy to try whatever you're offering Basically, so it shouldn't be a big deal once you are ready guys.

Cynthia (Dtravel): 24:29

Yeah, what's interesting is so I'm still an Airbnb host and I actually got a notice yesterday telling me that they're moving to what they call simplified pricing. So over the last two years there's obviously been a lot of uproar from travelers about the fees. So Airbnb has been testing out this idea of either hiding fees or showing fees or making hosts pay for the fees, and then the idea is the host just mark up their own costs to take into account those fees. So they basically sent me an email yesterday saying that, based on their testing, they have moved now to what they call simplified pricing, which means that hosts are required to pay for all of the fees and then they have to mark up the fees to account for that. But the language that they used was what we have found is that hosts who use simplified pricing and pay for the fees and keep their prices competitive get 17% more booking. I feel like the unspoken thing that they're saying is okay, you just pay the cheaper set, keep your prices the same and you're gonna get more bookings, but you're gonna lose more money. And I think that this is actually really good news for de-travel, because there's clearly a shift towards a lot of onus on the host. Right now, obviously, a lot of the power is in the travelers, but I think, as hosts look towards more and more options that help them diversify away from these platforms because it's not good for their business, and I think that represents a really good opportunity for companies like De-Travel, who are coming in and trying to really make it different and more beneficial for not just hosts but also for travelers as well.

BFG (aka Pete): 26:16

Yeah, I can, you know. So I've been a traveler all my life, mostly for business. But I always felt that the balance of power is not really okay because, especially in the travel industry, you pay for a lot of things in advance things you don't know, never saw, you have no idea what's happening and get anything back is kind of difficult. And also, you know, finding what you are looking for is like a skill which is unbelievably hard to come by. So you know, if you do it for 20 years, you kind of get a feel for how different platforms work. So if you have your assistant to book anything, you know it's gonna be 50-50 that it's gonna be a miss. So we might be the right hotel, right Star hotel. It's gonna be totally wrong place. Or you know that this hotel just sucks in Denver and you know it should be a different one. So I think, based on the fact that you know you guys are basically decentralized platform, there should be an ability for people to build whatever they want on top of the travel I imagine, like personalized searches or AI assistants which know you and can book the stuff for you.

Cynthia (Dtravel): 27:40

So that sounds exciting, at least for me. Yeah, yeah, that's definitely on our route, ma'am. So, as part of governance, obviously we wanna make it open for anybody to be able to build with the technology that we use, and so we are working towards open sourcing a lot of our products so that if, let's say, you, like you said, you wanna build an AI assistant on top of the Do you Travel Direct product or any of the other products, you can actually do that and you know, I really do believe that the way that you go faster and you become sustainable and you build a moat is to have other people feel like they're a part of it, and so why would you wanna go somewhere else if you feel like you're an owner and something you're gonna benefit from that? So that's really the vision that we're driving towards is making it so that anybody can contribute and then better fit that in that context.

BFG (aka Pete): 28:31

Yeah, so one of the reasons why I screen shared your web page is that it looks very user friendly, and I think it's important for people to see something. When they hear crypto, it's typically like, oh, this is gonna be hard. It's just the first reaction, and so I just wanted to showcase that you guys have it kind of really neat and that it looks like you are really thinking about the user way more than, or maybe at least in the same way, like about the technology behind it, which is great. I see we are kind of running towards the 30 minutes, so let's talk quickly about the team and then let's jump into like what would you like Guests I mean travelers and the hosts to do right now before you launch the meta search, because I think that's the good message to end up with.

Cynthia (Dtravel): 29:39

Sounds good. Yeah, what about the team specifically?

BFG (aka Pete): 29:42

I mean. So you guys I assume, as every crypto project, you guys are distributed team and I would like to know what's the ratio between the designers and engineers?

Cynthia (Dtravel): 29:59

Good question. So I would say most of our team actually comes from Fubble, which makes us quite unique, because there was a project in 2017 that I invested in that was supposed to be a decentralized Airbnb. It was a Web3 project. And I think the reason that they failed was twofold. One was the technology, so it just wasn't really there right now, which makes it a really good time right now to build in Web3, because tooling has become a lot more robust and mature. The second reason is that they didn't have subject matter expertise, and the travel industry, and specifically short term rentals, is very nuanced, I think, and if you don't understand those nuances it becomes really hard for you to build solutions, because there's a lot to consider. And I think the other thing is the connections and the reputation, because with the travel industry it's really hard to get partnerships if you don't have credibility. So that's definitely one thing that I think makes our team really unique and the best team position to be able to solve this problem, because most of us have a lot of experience in this industry, either having worked in it or definitely as people who have been community builders. I think the second thing is we also have a lot of expertise in the web three industry, because a lot of us have been in it for over five years, which it sounds crazy, but in the web three, that's obvious it's a long time, because that's probably more like 30 years.

BFG (aka Pete): 31:30

That's a long time. Yes, yeah. How was the size of the team?

Cynthia (Dtravel): 31:36

We have about 20 people.

BFG (aka Pete): 31:38

Okay, yeah, yeah. I think a lot of time people underestimate especially when they are setting up to build something like a marketplace, which is basically what you are trying to do that it's not enough to understand one side of the marketplace, you have to understand both. And definitely it's a great advantage if you have connections to the industry, so you can gain trust that people don't think you are lunatic with a token or a blockchain badge and they actually know that you're a normal person trying to solve the problem, so that definitely helps.

Cynthia (Dtravel): 32:17

Yeah.

BFG (aka Pete): 32:19

So what is the thing you would like hosts to do and the travelers to do in the first quarter of 2024?, because I assume we should talk again once you guys launch successfully the MetaSearch.

Cynthia (Dtravel): 32:34

Yeah, I would love that. Well, for hosts, if you want another distribution panel or if you want to set up a direct booking site, definitely come to detail. What's really unique and deliberate about what we've done is that we actually don't charge up front. So if you get a booking, that's when we charge, because we want to make it as frictionless and as easy as possible for people to get set up with direct bookings. And then for travelers, especially if you're a crypto traveler or you're a nomad, definitely join the wait list, because once we launch the MetaSearch, then I think it'll be really helpful for people, especially if they travel a lot, because we're going to have some three interesting things like traveler profiles, like a nomad profile, so if there's specific things that you're looking for as a nomad I think a nomad, including myself, knows how difficult it might be to find the right kind of properties. So, really being like a user-first approach to how we're solving for the MetaSearch, I think a lot of travelers will really find a lot of value in.

BFG (aka Pete): 33:35

That sounds awesome, by the way. A quick question Are you part of the crypto nomads club?

Cynthia (Dtravel): 33:40

I am. I'm actually one of the Lisbon I guess organizers, so I organize quite a lot of events here for a crypto nomads club. They're great for me. I love them.

BFG (aka Pete): 33:54

Neat, very neat, cool, and so I had a question on my tongue. Oh yeah, it was so. You charge at the booking. How much do you charge?

Cynthia (Dtravel): 34:07

3% 3%.

BFG (aka Pete): 34:08

Okay, so I think you guys have all the numbers you could ask for today. Please go to Detravel and register a property. I assume there was something like a website builder for the property or you guys build it specifically. I can do it myself if I have a property.

Cynthia (Dtravel): 34:25

Yes, yeah, it's self-serve, so it's really easy. You can literally set up a direct booking site in one or two minutes. We have an Airbnb import, which makes it really easy, if you already have an existing Airbnb profile, to just import, yeah, and think of it kind of like Shopify, where you can customize your direct booking site really easily. And, again, this hasn't really existed before. So the way that Airbnb made it really easy for people to list a property, we essentially want to do that with direct bookings make it as easy as possible for you to get started with direct bookings and give you the tooling to be able to do that.

BFG (aka Pete): 35:00

All right, awesome, so you got it. Guys, you know everything about Detravel. We could fit into sort of 30-ish minutes, and I'll be in touch with Cynthia, for sure after they launch the Meta-Surg, because I am interested in it myself. Awesome, thank you very much for the time that you spent with us today. It was awesome.

Cynthia (Dtravel): 35:25

Thank you, Zanfida.

BFG (aka Pete): 35:28

And you'll find all the links you need in the show notes, as always, and I wish you a great day.

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As you know, Web3 Magic podcast now has mintable episodes, so you can own a piece of history. By minting you support me and my work, and you also add more visibility to my guests and their projects!

Mint Episode 13 with Cynthia from Dtravel on Zora network.

That's it, friends. I hope you enjoyed the episode, and let me know what you think on Twitter (X) or Farcaster. Till next time … keep it colorful!

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