Germany’s Hahn Air recently used the open-source travel distribution platform Winding Tree to issue the world’s first airline ticket powered by the blockchain technology, the company announced.
Hahn has also become the first airline company to fly passengers holding blockchain-powered tickets on its flight that took off from Dusseldorf to Luxemburg on November 18.
The Winding Tree platform allows Hahn Air to list its inventory and manage their reservation requests and receive payments as soon as the booking process is completed. Passengers can pay by cash, credit card, or cryptocurrency (LIF token or Ether).
Frederick Nowotny, head of sales engineering at Hahn Air, said: “We at Hahn Air are constantly exploring new technologies and we are proud to now demonstrate our technical capability to issue blockchain-powered Hahn Air tickets. We are pleased to be partnering with Winding Tree, the most established company when it comes to distributing travel inventory in the blockchain.
“Our goal is to investigate and monitor the opportunities this technology holds for travel distribution, even if widespread acceptance is still a vision of the future,” Nowotny added.
The use cases of blockchain technologies in the travel industry are increasing rapidly. Earlier this month, Australian travel business Webjet launched its long-in-development blockchain-based platform in order to remove disparities in hotel booking data. Webject, which has been using Microsoft’s Azure blockchain-as-a-service sandbox since 2016, said that the new Rezchain application will address hotel reservation status and overcharges by looking for data mismatches in real-time between customers, hotels and booking agents, and sending alerts if any are found.
UK-based travel firm Alternative Airlines recently collaborated with Swiss cryptocurrency service Utrust to be able to provide customers with the ability to book flights using cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Dash, DigiByte (DGB) and Utrust’s native token UTK. This partnership will introduce instant cross border transactions, buyer protection, and crypto-to-cash settlements to the clients of Alternative Airlines.
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