Hotels Looking to Embrace Growing NFT Market as Additional Booking Method

Select hotels in North and Central America are trying out NFTs to avoid being saddled with unnecessary inventory if a guest cancels their booking close to booking dates.

A hotel in the Dominican Republic has partnered with a booking service Pinktada to create NFTs associated with hotel room reservations called Room-Night Tokens (RNT). Guests can purchase RNTs from Pinktada to reserve rooms at hotels in the Caribbean, Mexico, San Francisco,  and Hawaii, with more destinations coming soon.

How does it work?

Suppose a guest chooses to cancel a reservation. In that case, the RNT associated with that booking could be sold by the guest to another prospective guest, possibly one who is crypto-savvy. “We can reach another consumer that maybe isn’t booking through traditional means,” said Jason Kycek, a senior vice-president of Casa de Campo Resort & Villas in the Dominican Republic. Pinktada will allow RNTs to be sold at the market price, provided the transaction takes place at most two days before check-in. Guests can also use the NFTs to stay at another hotel in the Pinktada network, receiving a credit based on the market price of the token they hold. They will need to pay the difference.

“You give hotel owners certainty of income but give travelers the flexibility if their plans change to sell or swap tokens,” said Pinktada’s co-founder.

Pinktada submits new registrations on its website to hotel owners and only allows registered users to trade NFTs on its platform to avoid misgivings about hosting anonymous guests.

Another company, StayOpen, converts bookings for lodgings in unused commercial spaces to NFTs. The NFTs grant holders access to co-working spaces and accommodation at the company’s sole facility in Venice Beach, California. According to CEO Steve Shpilsky, NFTs can be gifted, sold, or used.

Sports and concert ticketing vendor StubHub offers a similar service. Ticket holders to a sold-out event can sell their tickets to other fans by listing them on the StubHub website.

Proptech VC says NFTs are hot

Fifth Wall, a venture capital firm for companies innovating in the property technology space, is looking into NFTs. “This is a conversation that’s coming up more routinely in board meetings,” said Dan Wenhold, a Fifth Wall partner to the Wall Street Journal. NFTs are immutable digital certificates of authenticity recorded on a blockchain that document the authenticity and provenance of a digital or physical item. Noble House Hotels and Resorts, which operates two hotels in San Francisco, admitted that this new endeavor has yet to be proven. “This is somewhat unchartered territory,” said Stefan Muhle, regional director of the hotel group. “We’re just as curious as anyone to see how it’s going to shake out.”

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