What If Your Next Plane Ticket Was An NFT?
Plus, Elon Musk takes the next step in his chess match with Twitter
If you’re like me, then you haven’t traveled as much as you’d like in the last few years. You might have spent some time daydreaming about you next trip across the country or to a different continent. And you probably found yourself watching travel videos on YouTube and social media.
So what if crypto played a role in your next trip? For example, what if your plane ticket was an NFT?
TravelX hopes to make that idea that mainstream.
The company bills itself as bringing freedom, transparency, and a frictionless experience to travelers. They want to reimagine the whole experience, which admittedly has become fraught with delays, frustration, inconvenience, and annoyance.
When was the last time you had a great experience with an airline or airport? My answer is… never. But maybe it doesn’t have to be that way.
Last night in Paris, TravelX, AirEuropa, and Algorand came together for the world’s first NFTicket—their term for an NFT plane ticket. To commemorate the moment they hired artist Carlos Betancourt to design the collectible ticket and the team put some money behind the experience. The winner of the ticket auction will fly first class from Madrid to Miami in time for this year’s Art Basel, and will experience several exclusive events while in Florida. Interested parties celebrated the collaboration at the Gustave Eiffel Salon.
All very swanky, chic, and oh-so-Parisian. Nothing wrong with a little glamour when it comes to travel. We need more of it.
By the way, the first ever NFTicket sold for just over $1,000,0000 at the auction during the event. Yep. A million. Granted, its a piece of art, a ticket, and a trip all in one, but I think that number surprised even the TravelX team.
TravelX might just be onto a very interesting idea. Plane tickets as NFTs make them collectible, and that’s a significant opportunity since people often associate travel with important life events and good memories. NFTs are also sustainable and eliminate waste. They can be embedded with certain details like seat assignments, meal preferences, drink orders, and more. An NFT is more secure than a simple QR code.
And since these NFTickets will be rare, they will retain value and can be traded.
So will all NFT plane tickets be this pricey? In the long run, I doubt it. I think these first few in the NFTicket collection are mostly about showing the possibilities and usefulness of NFTs. At some point, there is hope for mass NFT adoption across many parts of daily life, from art to shopping to real estate to transit.
But ultimately, TravelX wants to make travel better by giving customers access to higher products, clearer terms, and less frustration. They also hope to reduce costs for airline companies, help them eliminate inefficiencies, and turbo charge profits. There is hungry for this kind of ingenuity. Why not use blockchain and crypto to do it?
Sounds like the sky is the limit…
Plus…
The Crypto Connection is for entertainment purposes only and is not meant to be financial advice. Please do your own research before investing in any asset class. Sara Celi is not a financial advisor, and holds several cryptocurrencies. To purchase her books on Amazon, please click here.