Nocturus

Nocturus is a blockchain-based hotel booking system. We provide an open and secure marketplace for hotels to list their room inventories and for customers, travel agents and resellers to search those inventories and book rooms.

Don’t these kinds of systems exist? Why do we need a new one?

Well, there are similar systems to what we’re proposing. They’re called the Global Distribution Systems (GDS) and they use their middleman position to charge enormous fees. Fees for listings, fees for searching, fees for booking. There’s a fee for everything. Worse than this, integrating with them is both expensive and difficult, making it hard for new companies to enter the booking business.

To fight the GDS system and fees, hotels have developed alternate sales channels such as direct contracts with major business travel customers (corp-to-corp), direct connections to major online travel agents, direct to customer sales, or partnerships with resellers. But these types of deals require separate contracts for each new partner which limits them to only the largest chains, and hotel owners rarely have the bargaining power to negotiate fair commissions. What this all boils down to in the end is enormous distribution costs for hotels. Between 20 and 50 percent of the cost of a hotel room is fees or commissions, depending on the channel.

Our solution is simple: we will replace all these channels with a unified blockchain based solution than any hotel can use. Legal contracts will be replaced by smart contracts, enforced in code, that any hotel or partner can use without the need for negotiations. And the only fee will be a small 2% flat fee on bookings.

The savings will be enormous. In just the US market our system will save hotels 7.5 billion dollars a year in GDS booking fees alone, not even counting listing, searching, or all the other GDS fees. At the same it would generate 2.2 billion dollars of revenue for Nocturus.

On top of this direct savings, we expect out software will further reduce commissions paid to resellers by reducing the barriers to entry to the market and enabling small innovative players to price compete with the larger resellers.

What we plan to build:
1. GDS – a free to list, free to search middleware that any hotel or travel agency can use.
2. Direct Connections – smart contracts to allow hotels to offer special rates to high volume travel agencies
3. Reseller Partnerships – smart contracts to allow hotels to offer special sale terms such as group discounts
4. Corp-to-Corp – smart contracts to allow corporations to make business travel arrangements with chains or individual hotels
5. Direct to Customer – allows customers to book directly from the hotel, via our Android and iOS apps or hotel websites